The analysis, conducted by research unit Dongbi, included data from 2020 to 2024 and found that the number of top scientists in China has increased, while the number in the United States has decreased.
The team behind the report sampled more than 40,000 highly cited scientific papers published between 2020 and 2024 in 129 top international academic journals across a range of disciplines, and then extracted information about the authors.
Wu Dengsheng, founder of Dongbi Data and a professor at Shenzhen University’s business school, said the analysis showed how the sector is changing around the world.
“Over the past five years, the global landscape of top-level science and technology talent has undergone profound changes,” Wu said.
“China and the United States are consistently dominating, but with diametrically opposed trends,” he said.
In terms of distribution, China’s top scientists are concentrated on the country’s east coast and in first-tier cities, while Americans are mainly clustered at universities and research institutes in California and Massachusetts.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, the world’s largest scientific organization with more than 100 institutes across China, topped the list with 3,615 top scientists. This number is far higher than Harvard University’s 1,683 and Stanford University’s 1,208.
Outside the U.S. and China, the number of top scientists in Germany remained relatively stable over the five-year period, showing only a slight decline, while Britain and France saw a downward trend. Japan and Australia also saw declines in both the number and overall percentage of top scientists.
The report’s findings, along with the results of other similar analyses, point to a shift in scientific strength between the U.S. and China in recent years.
According to a report published in 2023 by the China Institute of Scientific and Technical Information, under the Ministry of Science and Technology, China contributed nearly a third of the academic papers published in the most influential international journals in 2022.
This was the first time that China had overtaken the US to secure the top spot worldwide.
In the latest issue of Nature — one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific journals — published on January 8, nearly half of the studies included work by ethnic Chinese researchers.
