The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) released a report showing that China is a dominant force in global science, the full impact of which, the report implies, has not been understood by the world community. Using data from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) Leiden Rankings, published by Leiden University in the Netherlands, STINT has been able to rank universities across six tables based on the number of highly cited publications they publish.
Erik Forsberg, STINT’s representative in China and ASEAN, felt it necessary to write this report since he felt too little attention has been placed on this matter, as most of the other studies were based on outdated material. The report therefore uses metrics that focus on research impact alone.
The report contains tables noting the Leiden rankings from 2002 to 2012 and compares them to the rankings from 2019 to 2020. In the first period, there were no Chinese universities in the top ten rankings for any of the sciences. Ten years later, Chinese universities represented four of the top five in the top 20 universities in science. These were Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Tsinghua University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
A second table shows the top 10% of universities in number of most cited scientific publications. In the biological and health sciences, this was not so dramatic, although there is growing interest in this lately. From 2002 to 2012, there were no Chinese universities in the top 20, whereas in the later period, there were 7.
