China will overtake US in bioscience research by 2020, says CiteAb
Japan is also likely to fall from second to fifth in world rankings
China is expected to overtake the US bioscience market, forecasts CiteAb, which was spun out from the University of Bath, UK earlier this month.
The company has a database of more than 1.8m antibodies from suppliers all over the world, and uses academic research citations to rank them. It is therefore able to produce an overview of the amount of research being carried out in more than 100 different countries.
'The data we’ve pulled from CiteAb clearly shows that China is the big winner at the moment,' said CiteAb's Founder Andrew Chalmers. 'The US has been the most productive nation in bioscience research for a long time, but has seen a gradual decrease in output since 2010.'
Conversely, China’s output has been growing enormously since 2009 and if current trends continue CiteAb expects to see China overtake the US by 2020. To counter this, the US will need to increase investment in bioscience research.
CiteAb data also suggests that Japan's share of the world’s bioscience output has gradually fallen since 2009, which is likely to cause the country to fall from second in the world in 2009 to fifth.
Germany and the UK appear to remain stable, and are therefore likely to become the third and fourth most active bioscience research nations as Japan drops down, said Chalmers.
The data we’ve pulled from CiteAb clearly shows that China is the big winner at the moment
It was recently reported by The Economist that bioscience research spend is moving East, with China’s funding increasing by 33% a year between 2007 and 2012, whereas the US saw a decrease of 2% a year. The total share of research funding in the US shrank from 51% in 2007 to 45% in 2012.
Chalmers said: 'We know that China’s most recent five-year plan makes research in this sector a priority, and the data we’re extracting from CiteAb demonstrates that this policy is having a direct impact on the quantity of research we see coming out of the country.
'The quality is also there – we can see that an increasing number of papers from Chinese researchers are being published by top journals. Cell now runs a number of spotlight articles focused on China’s research and a number of Nature’s 2013 research highlights were focused on Chinese work.'
This data has been taken from the first CiteAb market report, which is available from the company here.