China in the world life science pattern

3 High-impact research contributions to life sciences in China

Analysis of high-impact papers in the past 10 years

By using the data of scientific literature database to build a visual map, the contribution and development level of a country's scientific research can be analyzed macroscopically. For a rapidly developing science and technology country, it is obviously biased to evaluate the total number of papers and the number of citations per article, and the total number of citations is relatively reasonable [45]. However, with China now employing more than 5 million full-time people per year in research and experimental development (R&D), far more than in the United States and Europe, it makes more sense to focus on analyzing high-impact research activities. High impact papers include highly cited papers and hot papers. In this paper, Clarivate Analytics' InCite research evaluation and analysis platform is used to analyze only highly cited papers within the top 1% of citations in the same field (hereinafter referred to as "top 1% papers"). While there may be a few exceptions (i.e. the academic impact is not really high), and scientific papers do not represent the full spectrum of scientific and technological strength, the top 1% of papers generally reflect outstanding research with substantial contributions from all parties. Figure 2 shows the composition of the top 15 countries (hereinafter referred to as the "Top 15") in the top 1% of global life science papers, showing the distribution, relative rank and changes of high-impact research output in major scientific and technological powers in the past 10 years. After 20 years of "tracking development" with a very thin foundation, China's life science research began to enter the field of vision in the first decade of the 21st century, and then showed a sustained and strong growth momentum. In the 10-year span of 2012, 2016 and 2021, the top 1% papers published by Chinese scholars accounted for 5.5%, 8.1% and 14.1% of the total number of the top 15 in biological sciences, respectively; medical sciences, 3.1%, 5.2% and 8.0%; For agriculture sciences, 9.4%, 15.2% and 24.8% (Figure 3). This analysis is mainly based on the major disciplinary directions of each field, some sub-disciplines are not fully collected, or there is crossover in the three fields, but it does not affect the overall trend shown in the statistical results. In addition, the contributions of Chinese scholars in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan have not been counted.