China has massively expanded the amount of co-authored research it?publishes with countries in?Asia and the Middle East, a?study has found.

The findings are being seen as a further sign that China is gaining on the US ¨C for decades the leading nation in global research output ¨C in the race to publish ever more papers.

¡°The analysis for all measures demonstrates a clear pattern for moving away from a single pole in global science,¡± said Yusuf Ikbal Oldac, a?postdoctoral fellow at Lingnan University¡¯s Institute of Policy Studies.

China is ¡°moving up fast and gaining increasingly more¡± on the US science system, he noted.

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Speaking at a seminar hosted by the Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Dr?Oldac shared his findings from a paper still under review, which compares collaborations between the two largest global science powers and a group of countries caught between them geographically and politically.

Using data from the Web of Science and Scopus, Dr?Oldac examined co-authored papers for six Muslim-majority nations: Egypt, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

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Half of the countries studied saw their co-publications with Chinese authors rise by more than a factor of 30, while the other half witnessed an increase of more than a factor of?10, Dr?Oldac found. By contrast, none of the countries reported more than a 10-fold increase in co-authored papers with US-based authors.

While collaborations between these countries and the US have grown in terms of the total number of papers published, the country has ¡°gradually lost its place¡± relative to China, with which there has been an ¡°exponential increase¡± in co-authored papers, he noted.

Although China¡¯s closure to the world during the Covid pandemic could still curtail its collaborations, Dr Oldac said this had yet to transpire ¨C possibly reflecting pre-existing cross-border relationships between scientists and a continued output of co-authored papers during the pandemic.

He predicted that scientific collaborations between the Muslim-majority nations and the US and China would continue to grow, though perhaps at a different pace.

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¡°Currently, most of these countries do not collaborate with China at the expected level...they are not at their full potential now,¡± he said.

Simon Marginson, director of the CGHE and a professor in education at the University of Oxford, said public investment in science would continue to be a large factor in determining ¡°who¡¯s the fattest fish in the pond¡±.

Given that the US has maintained its science budget under the Democrats, there is ¡°every likelihood¡± that it will remain ¡°very strong¡± in the area, he believes.

¡°The only reason why US appears to be diminishing [its power] is simply¡­the growth [of] the other players,¡± he said.

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Meanwhile, China¡¯s investment in its research and development over the past couple of decades is still ¡°pipelining through the system¡±, but a?slowed economy could mean a dip in some grants and a somewhat more sluggish pace of scientific collaborations.

But regardless of how quickly either of the two big rivals advances relative to the other, the current China-US competition in science has the potential to reshape the global science system, said Professor Marginson.

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¡°They¡¯re both enormous fish¡­if they continue to decouple, potentially we are going to have two science systems developing in parallel rather than together.¡±

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com