China’s lead over the United States in global scientific output has leapt, as new data shows that the gap between the two powers has more than quadrupled in the space of a year, according to Nature’s 2025 index of research papers published in the world’s top scientific journals, Nature reports.

The US already lost the lead to China in the Research Leaders list in 2023, which ranks countries, territories and institutions based on their contributions to papers in 145 high-quality health-sciences and natural-science journals, but the gap has now become a “chasm”, according to Nature.

“China’s adjusted share – which takes account of annual fluctuations in the volume of articles in the database year on year – jumped by 17.4% in the year to 2023. At the same time, the United States’ adjusted share plummeted by 10.1%,” reports Nature.

Although the latest ranking predates the current Trump administration, observers warn that his dramatic defunding of basic research and his attack on top US universities will accelerate the US decline and the rate of China’s gain.

“The United States is not the only Western research system to be impacted by the rapid rise of China: Canada, France and the United Kingdom all suffered falls in their adjusted share of at least 9%,” reports Nature.

China now employs more researchers than both America and the entire EU combined, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a science-policy think-tank in Washington DC.

Beijing has rapidly accelerated the amount of investment into science and technology in recent years and has started to overtake the US in sector after sector. China already has the lead in EV and renewable energy research, its DeepSeek AI is as powerful as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but cost a fraction to develop, and China is rapidly advancing plans to build a “low-altitude economy” where groceries are delivered to your door by drone and workers can avoid the crowds with air taxis in its largest cities, which will be a $280bn business by 2030, say experts. China has even successfully built a nuclear fusion reactor that produces more power than is put in to make it run.

According to the Nature Index, China topped the 2024 Research Leaders ranking with a share score of 32,122, far ahead of the United States’ 22,083. The Index measures author contributions to high-quality research journals in health and natural sciences.

“The gap between the two countries threatens to become a chasm very quickly,” wrote Benjamin Plackett in Nature.

The 2024 decline was sharpest in chemistry (11.6%) and the physical sciences (10.6%), though even the US-led fields of health and biological sciences recorded declines of 2.7% and 5.4% respectively. China, by contrast, increased its biological sciences share by 20.4%.

Joanne Carney, chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told Nature that the United States had “clearly crossed a threshold into actively abdicating our position as a global leader in research and development and innovation”. She added: “We’ll need to act fast.”

Much of China’s momentum stems from its long-term structural investments into science. A 2021 Georgetown University study forecast that Chinese universities would graduate 77,000 STEM PhDs annually by 2025, nearly double the US figure of 40,000.

US public research funding is in a period of turmoil. President Donald Trump has launched an attack on top universities, trying to force them to hand over control of management and academic curricula. The 2026 budget proposal slash nearly $18bn – or 40% – from the National Institutes of Health as part of his “big beautiful tax bill” to fund tax cuts for the rich, while the Environmental Protection Agency and National Science Foundation face cuts of 55% and 57% respectively.

“If Congress enacts the President’s skinny budget, the consequences for the future of our nation would be catastrophic,” said Sudip Parikh, AAAS chief executive office, in an online statement. “The United States will no longer be in the global race for R&D leadership  –  we will have lost it.”

In particular, the Trump administration has frozen $2.2bn in federal funding to Harvard University and threatened to revoke its ability to enrol international students over governance disputes, in what some researchers have called a “national crisis.”

While some private funders have increased research spending, researchers say that the private sector will not be able to close the gap in R&D investment.

China has long been capitalising on the US’ research malaise and for years it has been offering the so-called “sea turtles” – the best Chinese researchers working in US labs – to return home, by building state-of-the-art facilities with large research grants. Now this effort has been boosted by Trump’s policies of turning away top foreign researchers at the border despite the fact they have both visas and research grants. International collaboration patterns are also shifting. China is deepening ties with regional peers, while partnerships with US-based researchers are fading, reports Nature.

“It sends signals to foreign researchers to look for a job somewhere else,” Plackett reports, referencing visa issues and political instability in the US.

South Korea and Singapore have also moved up in the Nature Index rankings, driven in part by green technology and materials science, and part from collaboration with Chinese scientists. South Korea climbed to seventh overall, with an 11% rise in biological sciences output, while Singapore recorded a 23% jump in health sciences publications.

By contrast, despite a root and branch reform of its university system and basic research and development programmes, Russia lags far down the list at 22 place and produces two orders of magnitude less papers than China: 900 in 2024.

Russia still leads in a few areas such as advanced avionics and it had a knockout success with the rapid development and production of the Sputnik V vaccine, the first and still most effective vaccine against the coronavirus, but these remain exceptions to the rule. Nevertheless, as bne IntelliNews reported, sanctions have become a spur that is accelerating Russian technological innovation that can at least alleviate the impact of technology sanctions on the country.

Nature cautions that the US still has a narrow window to reverse course, but as long as Trump is in office a recovery is unlikely.

“We only have this year and next year to turn it around,” Plackett reports. If not, the transition of science and innovation leadership from West to East may become irreversible.

 

Nature’s Research Leaders List
Position	Country/territory	Share 2023	Share 2024	Count 2024	Change in Adjusted Share 2023–2024
1	China	23580.30	32121.81	37273	17.4%
2	United States of America (USA)	21160.53	22082.59	31930	-10.1%
3	Germany	4397.78	5000.90	10559	-2.0%
4	United Kingdom (UK)	3810.87	3942.01	9528	-10.9%
5	Japan	3015.07	3185.39	5555	-9.0%
6	France	2301.44	2421.39	5955	-9.3%
7	South Korea	1670.92	2017.95	3431	4.1%
8	Canada	1780.90	1854.49	4566	-10.3%
9	India	1506.64	1783.34	2733	2.0%
10	Switzerland	1417.24	1522.50	3967	-7.4%
11	Australia	1300.91	1472.49	3979	-2.5%
12	Italy	1349.90	1435.86	4050	-8.4%
13	Spain	1271.17	1396.60	3870	-5.3%
14	Netherlands	1206.89	1205.94	3372	-13.9%
15	Sweden	793.72	841.36	2612	-8.7%
16	Singapore	555.46	690.01	1799	7.0%
17	Israel	632.49	648.01	1467	-11.7%
18	Denmark	677.15	634.20	1887	-19.3%
19	Belgium	486.30	529.17	1677	-6.2%
20	Taiwan	437.49	527.41	1255	3.9%
21	Austria	405.69	464.11	1547	-1.4%
22	Russia	376.92	400.82	920	-8.4%
23	Brazil	301.43	370.69	1198	6.0%
24	Poland	331.33	335.56	1270	-12.7%
25	Finland	282.90	307.76	1030	-6.3%
26	Czech Republic	208.14	275.40	980	14.0%
27	Norway	270.81	246.06	931	-21.7%
28	Saudi Arabia	134.87	176.65	596	12.8%
29	Portugal	137.60	169.70	737	6.3%
30	Iran	117.94	136.45	353	-0.3%
31	Ireland	127.23	133.37	644	-9.7%
32	Chile	117.26	131.13	619	-3.7%
33	New Zealand	142.60	130.64	500	-21.1%
34	South Africa	108.26	118.04	590	-6.1%
35	Turkey	105.23	114.38	588	-6.3%
36	Hungary	95.64	107.21	451	-3.4%
37	Greece	84.87	106.76	566	8.4%
38	Mexico	86.18	103.53	445	3.5%
39	Argentina	88.84	101.51	439	-1.5%
40	Thailand	66.28	79.10	406	2.8%
41	Slovenia	50.46	48.31	249	-17.5%
42	United Arab Emirates	38.91	43.82	262	-3.0%
43	Iceland	30.54	41.84	149	18.1%
44	Pakistan	41.10	40.90	277	-14.3%
45	Vietnam	35.21	36.82	138	-9.9%
46	Ukraine	29.85	32.39	258	-6.5%
47	Estonia	33.23	32.36	204	-16.1%
48	Romania	29.93	32.11	343	-7.5%
49	Croatia	33.66	30.81	207	-21.2%
50	Luxembourg	29.48	28.61	100	-16.4%
Source: Nature

 

Footnote

Each year, the Nature Index publishes tables based on counts of high-quality research outputs in the previous calendar year. Users please note:

The data behind the tables are based on a relatively small proportion of total research papers, they cover the natural sciences and health sciences only and outputs are non-normalised (that is, they don’t reflect the size of the country or institution, or its overall research output).

The Nature Index is one indicator of institutional research performance. The metrics of Count and Share used to order Nature Index listings are based on an institution’s or country’s publication output in 145 natural-science and health-science journals. The journals were selected on reputation by an independent panel of leading scientists in their fields. The list is reviewed periodically and journals may be removed or added. Articles from eLife were no longer included in the Nature Index from 2023 after the journal changed its publishing model.

Nature Index recognizes that many other factors must be taken into account when considering research quality and institutional performance; Nature Index metrics alone should not be used to assess institutions or individuals.

Nature Index data and methods are transparent and available under a creative commons licence at nature.com/nature-index/.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

The Nature Index database undergoes regular updating, corrections, adjustment of institutional hierarchies, and removal of retracted papers and thus the live website can differ from the research leaders tables.

Research Leaders tables from previous years are also updated annually to reflect any changes to the database. This means rankings and metrics may differ from the table when first released.