The Decline of American Research

Looking through the  data of the latest SCImago Journal and Country Rank is a sobering experience. If you just look at the data for the quarter century from 1996 to 2020 then there is nothing very surprising. But an examination of the data year by year shows a clear and  frightening picture of scientific decline in the United States.

Over the whole of the quarter century the United States has produced 11,986,435 citable documents, followed by China with 7,229,532, and the UK with 3,347,117.

Quantity, of course, is not everything when comparing research capability. We also need to look at quality. SJCR also supplies data on citations which are admittedly an imperfect assessment of quality: they can be easily gamed with self-citations, mutual citations, and so on. They often measure what is fashionable, not that which contributes to public welfare or advances in fundamental science. They are at the moment, however, if collected and analysed carefully and competently, perhaps the least unreliable and subjective metric available for describing the quality of research.

Looking at the number of citations per paper, we have to set  a threshold otherwise the top country for quality would be Anguilla, followed by the Federated States of Micronesia, and Tokelau. So we wrote in a 50,000 paper threshold over the 25 years.

Top place for citations   in 1996-2020 goes to Switzerland, followed by the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden, with the USA in fifth place and the UK in tenth. Apart from the US it looks like the leaders in research are Cold Europe, the countries around the North and Baltic seas plus Switzerland.

China is well down the list in 51st place.

Things look very different when we look at the data year by year. In 1996 the USA was well ahead of everybody for  the output of citable documents with 350,258 documents, followed by Japan with 89,430. Then came the UK, Germany, France, Russia. China is a long way behind in nineth place with 30,856 documents.

Fast forward to 2020. Looking at output, China has now overtaken the US for citable documents and India has overtaken Germany and Japan. That is something that has been anticipated for quite some time.

That's quantity. Bear in mind that China and India have bigger populations than the USA so the output per capita is a lot less. For the moment.

Looking at citations per paper published in 1996 the United states had 42.14 citations or 1.62 per year over the quarter century. By 2020 this had shrunk to 1.22 per year.

It is possible that the annual score will pick up in later years as the US recovers from the lockdown and the virus before its competitors. It is equally possible that those papers may get fewer citations as time passes.

But Switzerland, which  was slightly ahead of the US in 1996, is in 2020 well in front, having improved its annual count of citations per paper from 1.65 to 1.68. Then there a cluster of other countries that have overtaken the US -- Australia, the  Netherlands, the UK.

And now China has also overtaken the US for quality with 1.23 citations per paper per year.

It looks as though the current pandemic will just accelerate what was happening anyway. Unless something drastic happens we can look forward to China steadily attaining and maintaining hegemony over the natural sciences.