As recent tensions between China, the United States, and other Western nations spill over into the realm of science, scientific and technological self-reliance takes center stage in China's 14th five-year plan (Mallapaty, 2021). The 5th Plenary Session of the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee clearly states that developing science and technology through self-reliance and self-strengthening provides the strategic underpinning for China's development. For scientific research, “Self-reliance” emphasizes independence and controllability, and is manifested in autonomy; “self-strengthening” is manifested in academic contribution. To enhance national research strength, the Chinese government has continued to increase R&D investment and support international scientific communication in various ways, resulting in a rapid increase in the number and share of international collaborative papers (He, 2009; Zhou & Glänzel, 2010). Besides, globalization also facilitates China's research development rapidly, which benefits a lot from international collaboration. Recent studies found that China has become the largest contributor to global research papers (Tollefson, 2018). Meanwhile, some studies showed that more and more Chinese scholars appear as the first author or corresponding author in academic papers (Bornmann et al., 2015; Wang & Wang, 2017; Wang et al., 2013). There is no doubt about the rapid development of China's research. However, under the background of extensive international collaboration, it is not sufficient to assess the national research strength only through the number of papers or citation frequency. Similar to artificial intelligence technology, quantum technology is a kind of disruptive technology highly valued by governments all over the world. China has more papers published than the United States since 2013, and in 2020, the number of papers from China is 40,180, accounting for 22.96% of the total number of quantum papers in the world. This paper explores a novel metric model from the perspective of collaboration academic position in co-authored papers to better understand China's scientific research strength in quantum technology.
Research strength analysis refers to measuring, comparing, and analyzing the research status of different scientific research bodies (such as countries, institutions, researchers, et al.) in various research fields (Ma et al., 2018). Bibliometrics is commonly recognized as an efficient approach for measuring, comparing, and assessing the performance/strength of scientists, institutions, and countries (Díaz-Faes et al., 2015; Haeffner-Cavaillon & Graillot-Gak, 2009; Harnad, 2008; Inglesi-Lotz & Pouris, 2011; Jia et al., 2014). The number of papers and citations are most commonly used as the indicators (Liu & Mei, 2015; Mokhnacheva & Kharybina, 2011; Morris et al., 2003; Shibata et al., 2008; Small et al., 2014; Small & Upham, 2009). However, assessing scientific strength should be more constructive under the background of seeking self-reliance and self-strengthening. Hence, the paper provides a novel model synthesizing the national scientific self-reliance and the national academic contribution.
The measure of scientific self-reliance and allocation of academic contribution is essential for national research strength to assess in this paper, and there are many ways to measure these two indicators. In this paper, scientific self-reliance refers to the rate of independent publications and the degree of research autonomy in collaboration based on the international collaboration patterns (Edler, 2010; González-Alcaide et al., 2017; Kato & Ando, 2017; Zheng et al., 2014; Zou & Laubichler, 2017). The previous studies on international collaboration are measured mainly through various indicators, such as the number, share, and intensity from different perspectives (Chen et al., 2019). However, previous studies only took into account the number of papers published by the country as corresponding or first author in international collaboration (Cho et al., 2010; Egghe, 1991), when they calculated the dominance degree of a country, resulting in ignoring the dominance of the country in other collaboration positions. Thus, in this paper, we propose five collaboration dominance patterns based on the different academic positions of countries to measure the degree of national scientific self-reliance in research collaboration. Allocation of academic contribution is also essential for national scientific research strength to assess, and it is one of the factors we consider in building the metric model. Various methods have been proposed for calculating academic contributions. The earliest method was the First Author Counting proposed by Cole & Cole (1974), which only considered the contribution of the first author and ignored the contribution of other authors. Lindsey (1980) used the Normal Counting method, which allocated the same contribution weight to each author, resulting in magnifying the secondary authors’ contributions and is unfair to the primary authors. Besides, there are methods based on the order of authorship, mainly including Fractional Counting (Charles & Oppenheim, 1998), Proportional Counting (Abbas, 2010, 2011; Van Hooydonk, 1997), Geometric Counting (Egghe et al., 2000), Harmonic Counting (Hagen, 2010; Hodge et al., 1981), Combined Credit Allocation (Liu & Fang, 2012a, 2012b), Correct Credit Distribution (Lukovits et al., 1995), and Network-based Allocation (Kim & Diesner, 2014). This method is a significant improvement over the Normal Counting (Lindsey, 1980), taking into account the effect of the number of authors and the rank of the byline on the size of the contribution. It is worth noting that the Network-based Allocation can reorder co-author sequences. If several corresponding authors are in a co-author sequence, then the related authors can be reordered based on the magnitude of their contributions before the contribution assignment. Based on the advantages of the Network-based Allocation, we calculate the national academic contribution based on the author's signature position and the contribution transfer principle in designing the national research strength metric model.
Considering the above model indicators, we explore a metric model for national scientific research strength evaluation through cooperation on research papers. The model mainly includes two indicators, national scientific self-reliance (
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the data collection and methods used in this paper are described. In Section 3, we present the specific experimental process and detailed results. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 4.
From the perspective of scientific research output, national strength in scientific research for a country could be regarded as the country's scientific contribution to the world. Considering the contribution difference made by co-authors from different countries at the paper level, this metric model sets two indicators to access the national strength in scientific research for country
The contribution distribution of each author in multi-author papers is complicated, and there is no unified method for it. However, only considering the contribution of the first author, corresponding author, or the average distribution is unfair. Since the author with the higher signature position in a paper makes more academic contributions (the corresponding author is placed in the first place in the calculation process). The author contribution transfer factor “
The national scientific self-reliance (
For the national scientific self-reliance shown by the country's independent publications, this paper calculates the proportion of independent papers published by country
For the national scientific self-reliance shown by the country collaborated with other countries, we first calculate the proportion of the multi-countries papers published by country
The autonomy we consider here is based on collaboration between two countries. For example, to the cooperative countries, country
In previous studies, when calculating the dominant degree of country
Five dominance patterns of
Collaboration patterns | Dominant country | Largest contributing country | Subordinate country | Weight |
---|---|---|---|---|
5/15 | ||||
4/15 | ||||
3/15 | ||||
2/15 | ||||
1/15 |
The data used for this method was collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database. We utilize the following search strategy (Zhang et al., 2018) for quantum technology papers which is based on the website of qurope.eu (BINOSI & CALARCO, 2017): TS=((“Quantum” and ((“information”) OR (“eraser”) OR (“Quantum Classical Transition”) OR (“coherence”) OR (“entanglement”) OR (“measurement”) OR (“network”) OR (“storage”) OR (“memory”) OR (“communication”) OR (“fingerprint”) OR (“processor”) OR (“Cavity QED”) OR (“clock synchronization”) OR (“image”) OR (“sensor”) OR (“magnetometry”))) OR ((quantum NEAR/5 comput*) OR (quantum NEAR/15 algorithm*) OR (quantum NEAR/10 simulat*) OR (quantum NEAR/10 error*) OR (“quantum circuit” OR “Quantum cellular automata” OR “Quantum Turing machine” OR “quantum register”) OR (quantum NEAR/10 communication*) OR (quantum NEAR/15 protocol*) OR (quantum NEAR/15 cryptograph*) OR (“quantum key”))).
We retrieved and downloaded paper data (Article and Review) from 1990 to 2021 in the WoS database for the bibliometric analysis (as of July 2021). Then We performed data cleaning, including removing duplicates and data with missing C1 fields. Finally, we collected a total of 175,002 publication records published by 147 countries. Each record has 30 meta-data fields: authors, title, affiliation, abstract, keywords, publication source, and reference list. All data processing, calculation, and exploration were conducted via python scripts.
The United States (US) and China are the top two countries based on the number of papers published in quantum technology, followed by Germany and England. There are 147 countries that publish 175,002 quantum technology papers, and 75.69% of the total papers are posted by the top 10 countries with the highest publications (see Table 2(a)). There are 40,180 papers are from China, accounting for 22.96% of 175,002 papers, and 24.57% of them are published by multi-countries. The international collaboration rate is the lowest compared to the top 10 highly productive countries in quantum technology research, and the majority (10.58%) collaborated with the US (see Table 2(b)). Compared with European countries, especially Germany, England, and France, Asian countries, such as China, India, and Japan, are more independent with lower collaboration rates (in this case, 24.57%, 30.82%, and 39.85%, respectively).
Top 10 countries with the highest number of papers in quantum technology (a) and China's research collaboration layout (b).
Note: aCollaboration strength is calculated with Salton formula (Salton, 1983)
The development stage of quantum technology is manifested in the logistic growth curve by fitting the accumulation of literature. There is a goodness of fit with R2 = 0.919, and the model can effectively predict the development stage of quantum technology research (see Fig. 1). At present, the exponential growth period has just ended, and the number of papers will still increase. What's more, the model also presents the degree of quantum technology maturity and its corresponding time, that is, 0.1 (2003), 0.5 (2018), 0.9 (2034), and 0.99 (2049). China's paper amount surpassed the US's in 2013 and surpassed Europe's in 2020. China has been a big nation with the most significant number of papers and shows a continued growth trend in quantum technology research.
The growth trend of papers of quantum technology by China, USA, and Europe.
Note: The dotted line without dots is the predicted value in the cumulative growth curve.
Cooperation in scientific research is essential for a country to participate in global development. A country's position in the global cooperation network can reflect its own scientific and technological strength, and reflect its dominant power in future scientific and technological development. In this study, we construct a network of national scientific collaboration in the field of quantum technology (see Fig. 2). The strength of collaboration between countries along the Belt and Road, such as Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Georgia, Estonia, and Egypt, is the highest in the international research collaboration network. Although the number of collaborations among these countries is minimal, the strength of collaboration is among the top globally (see Table 3). The US and European countries emphasize international collaboration, but most are European countries. China is more independent in quantum research, with a large proportion of papers on its own. There are only 9,817 multi-nations papers collaborated with 99 countries in China's 40,180 quantum research papers. Most cooperation partners come from developed countries, such as the US, Singapore, Germany, England, et al. (see Table 2(b)).
Research collaboration strength network in the field of quantum technology.
Note: The nodes represent countries that have published papers in quantum technology. The edges represent the scientific collaboration between countries. The weights of the edges represent the strength of collaboration between countries calculated by the Salton formula (Salton, 1983). The node size represents the size of the betweenness centrality of a country, and the larger the node, the more collaboration resources the country controls. The thickness of the lines represents the collaboration strength, and the thicker the lines, the stronger the collaboration strength between the two countries. We selected 53 countries based on their collaboration strength (> 0.06).
Top 5 collaboration countries with the highest collaboration strength in quantum technology.
No. | Collaboration country (Number of papers) | Collaboration strengtha | Collaboration papers |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Sri Lanka (64); Cyprus (109) | 0.51 | 43 |
2 | Sri Lanka (64); Georgia (139) | 0.46 | 43 |
3 | Estonia (189); Sri Lanka (64) | 0.39 | 43 |
4 | Cyprus (109); Georgia (139) | 0.38 | 47 |
5 | Egypt (1,386); Saudi Arabia (1,567) | 0.36 | 528 |
Note:
Collaboration strength is calculated with Salton formula (Salton, 1983)
Global quantum research is dominated by the US and Europe (i.e. England, France, Germany) with high betweenness centrality, which refers to the ability to control information resources in a network (Brandes, 2001). By contrast, China's network centrality indexes are lower, betweenness ranked 6th, degree ranked 5th, and Closeness ranked 5th, well below the 2nd ranking by papers amount (see Table 4).
Statistics of the network centrality for the top 10 countries with the highest betweenness centrality in quantum technology.
No. | Country | Betweenness Centrality | Degree Centrality | Closeness Centrality |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | France | 0.0700 | 106 | 0.7650 |
2 | South Africa | 0.0607 | 90 | 0.7083 |
3 | USA | 0.0594 | 111 | 0.7846 |
4 | Germany | 0.0518 | 106 | 0.7650 |
5 | Spain | 0.0516 | 94 | 0.7183 |
6 | China | 0.0427 | 99 | 0.7391 |
7 | England | 0.0421 | 105 | 0.7612 |
8 | India | 0.0384 | 94 | 0.7217 |
9 | Canada | 0.0367 | 92 | 0.7116 |
10 | Sweden | 0.0335 | 89 | 0.7018 |
Based on the proposed indicator
Changes in the contribution of China and the US in developed and developing countries.
Note: The first column on the left represents the developed countries’ contribution proportion from 2001 to 2020. The second column on the left represents the USA's contribution proportion from 2001 to 2020. The first column on the right represents the developing countries’ contribution proportion from 2001 to 2020. The second column on the right represents China's contribution proportion from 2001 to 2020.
Ranking of academic contribution (
No. | Country | Contribution proportion | No. | Country | Contribution proportion | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | USA | 1,593,667.96 | 30.57% | 75 | Cameroon | 364.35 | 0.007% |
2 | China | 639,792.41 | 12.28% | 76 | Iceland | 358.65 | 0.007% |
3 | Germany | 471,644.89 | 9.05% | 77 | Moldova | 332.54 | 0.006% |
4 | England | 317,155.23 | 6.08% | 78 | Indonesia | 326.91 | 0.006% |
5 | Japan | 230,317.08 | 4.42% | 79 | Ethiopia | 294.08 | 0.006% |
6 | Italy | 199,203.76 | 3.82% | 80 | Philippines | 291.82 | 0.006% |
7 | France | 198,179.40 | 3.80% | 81 | Czechoslovakia | 281.92 | 0.005% |
8 | Canada | 163,038.66 | 3.13% | 82 | Kazakhstan | 238.84 | 0.005% |
9 | Austria | 154,559.69 | 2.96% | 83 | Jordan | 213.80 | 0.004% |
10 | Switzerland | 135,561.92 | 2.60% | 84 | Kuwait | 206.25 | 0.004% |
11 | Spain | 113,040.28 | 2.17% | 85 | Sri Lanka | 200.63 | 0.004% |
12 | Australia | 111,733.35 | 2.14% | 86 | Oman | 196.78 | 0.004% |
13 | India | 91,204.80 | 1.75% | 87 | Lebanon | 162.98 | 0.003% |
14 | Netherlands | 80,271.91 | 1.54% | 88 | Malta | 155.93 | 0.003% |
15 | South Korea | 62,339.05 | 1.20% | 89 | Brunei | 98.70 | 0.002% |
16 | Russia | 61,630.01 | 1.18% | 90 | Azerbaijan | 92.67 | 0.002% |
17 | Israel | 60,244.46 | 1.16% | 91 | Palestine | 83.25 | 0.002% |
18 | Poland | 51,529.10 | 0.99% | 92 | Macedonia | 81.75 | 0.002% |
19 | Sweden | 46,708.93 | 0.90% | 93 | Vatican | 74.46 | 0.001% |
20 | Brazil | 41,762.49 | 0.80% | 94 | Bosnia & Herceg | 72.07 | 0.001% |
... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
74 | Bahrain | 368.82 | 0.007% | 147 | Eritrea | 0.23 | 0.000004% |
Note: Developing countries in gray background. The basis for the division between developed and developing countries is the Word Economic Outlook(International Monetary Fund, 2018), in which International Monetary Fund (IMF) divides 193 countries into two categories: 39 developed countries and 154 developing countries.
In this section, we try to understand China's research autonomy in quantum scientific collaboration through the research autonomy index (
As shown in Table 6, China's dominance over the US is 20.02%, while the US's dominance over China is 10.36%. Thus the research autonomy index for China over the US (Autonomy
Partial results of the research autonomy in national research collaboration (ranking by China's collaboration strength)
China | USA | Singapore | Japan | Australia | ... | Algeria | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
China | ↙10.36% |
↙10.66% |
↙11.76% |
↙9.53% |
↙6.67% |
||
USA | ↙20.02% |
↙12.97% |
↙12.92% |
↙14.18% |
↙12.38% |
||
Singapore | ↙19.71% |
↙12.88% |
↙15.87% |
↙15.22% |
↙0.00% |
||
Japan | ↙16.86% |
↙14.51% |
↙10.54% |
↙15.79% |
↙33.33% |
||
Australia | ↙20.37% |
↙13.28% |
↙11.19% |
↙10.26% |
↙0.00% |
||
... | ... | ... | |||||
Algeria | ↙6.67% |
↙10.48% |
↙0.00% |
↙0.00% |
↙33.33% |
... |
Notes: ↙ represents the
↑ represents the
Distribution of the number of countries with
Developed countries (31) | 28 | 2 | 1 |
Developing countries (68) | 42 | 11 | 15 |
Note: In the row label, (31) and (68), represents the number of developed and developing countries in our datasets respectively.
The distribution of the proportion of papers in five dominance patterns for China-leading research collaboration in quantum technology is listed in Table 8. We found that China often plays a role as the dominant country (the first row in Table 8), and the largest contribution country when collaborating with the developed countries. In particular, China mainly cooperates as the
Distribution of the proportion of papers in the five dominance patterns of
China | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Developed Countries | 64.13% | 1.64% | 1.01% | 1.26% | 31.96% |
USA | 79.99% | 2.39% | 0.65% | 1.30% | 15.66% |
Germany | 66.77% | 0.81% | 1.21% | 0.70% | 30.51% |
England | 63.17% | 1.02% | 1.89% | 0.87% | 33.04% |
Japan | 67.23% | 1.38% | 0.61% | 2.60% | 28.18% |
France | 41.99% | 1.10% | 1.38% | 1.10% | 54.42% |
Italy | 49.40% | 5.22% | 0.80% | 2.01% | 42.57% |
Canada | 69.73% | 1.44% | 1.26% | 1.08% | 26.49% |
Developing Countries | 29.75% | 0.51% | 1.06% | 1.24% | 67.44% |
India | 42.52% | 2.80% | 1.40% | 2.34% | 50.93% |
Russia | 31.58% | 0.38% | 1.88% | 0.75% | 65.41% |
Note: The five dominance patterns are classified based on Table 1.
The countries are selected based on the number of their papers published in quantum technology (see Table 2(a)).
China's
Ranking of scientific research strength index (SS) in global quantum technology.
No. | Country | No. | Country | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | USA | 0.54 | 853,088.21 | 75 | Philippines | 0.22 | 63.31 |
2 | China | 0.77 | 493,650.57 | 76 | Moldova | 0.19 | 61.86 |
3 | Germany | 0.36 | 170,519.88 | 77 | Indonesia | 0.16 | 51.88 |
4 | Japan | 0.59 | 136,364.59 | 78 | Macedonia | 0.62 | 50.78 |
5 | England | 0.33 | 105,841.36 | 79 | Kazakhstan | 0.21 | 49.26 |
6 | Italy | 0.42 | 84,291.22 | 80 | Jordan | 0.21 | 45.08 |
7 | India | 0.70 | 63,615.28 | 81 | Cuba | 0.07 | 41.72 |
8 | France | 0.32 | 63,100.22 | 82 | Qatar | 0.03 | 35.43 |
9 | Canada | 0.34 | 54,791.26 | 83 | Jamaica | 0.61 | 34.89 |
10 | Austria | 0.28 | 43,443.24 | 84 | Serbia Monteneg | 0.53 | 30.53 |
11 | Switzerland | 0.28 | 37,720.08 | 85 | Bahrain | 0.08 | 29.09 |
12 | Australia | 0.33 | 36,955.01 | 86 | Oman | 0.14 | 27.10 |
13 | Spain | 0.31 | 34,742.01 | 87 | Sri Lanka | 0.12 | 24.12 |
14 | South Korea | 0.55 | 34,124.41 | 88 | Brunei | 0.24 | 23.50 |
15 | Russia | 0.46 | 28,491.90 | 89 | North Korea | 0.33 | 23.45 |
16 | Iran | 0.77 | 23,826.65 | 90 | Malta | 0.14 | 21.40 |
17 | Israel | 0.37 | 22,480.51 | 91 | North Macedonia | 0.29 | 19.60 |
18 | Netherlands | 0.27 | 21,887.75 | 92 | Lebanon | 0.10 | 15.97 |
19 | Brazil | 0.52 | 21,704.77 | 93 | Bosnia & Herceg | 0.15 | 11.01 |
20 | Poland | 0.41 | 20,901.86 | 94 | Azerbaijan | 0.10 | 9.32 |
… | … | … | … | … | … | … | … |
74 | Cyprus | 0.08 | 29.09 | 147 | Panama | −0.08 | −5.01 |
Note: Developing countries in gray background
The national scientific self-reliance index (
The time trend of national scientific self-reliance index (SR).
Fig. 5 shows that the US's
The time trend of national rankings based on scientific research strength index (
Besides, the position of the other three developing countries, India, Russia, and Iran, in global quantum technology is also continuously rising and has been in the top 10
This paper explores a metric model for assessing national strength in scientific research to understand China's research output in quantum technology through collaboration. To this end, we propose two indicators from two perspectives: the national contribution to academic impact and the scientific self-reliance, to measure and assess China's scientific research strength and make a comparison with the US and other outstanding countries in global quantum technology, such as Germany, England, Japan, and Italy in developed countries and Russia, India, Iran, and Brazil in developing countries.
Our results lend support to China's prominent position in quantum technology currently (Smith-Goodson, 2019) measured by the metric model of national strength in scientific research. The proportion of international collaboration papers of China is lower and the research on quantum technology in China locates in a more marginal position in global cooperation networks. However, China's total contribution to quantum technology is ranked the world 2nd, and its annual contribution has surpassed the US since 2015. The gradually increasing advantage for China vs. USA is also witnessed in Fig. 3, measured by the indicator national academic contribution (
China's scientific self-reliance is gradually increasing (see Fig. 4 right) and its scientific strength in quantum technology has surpassed the US, and taken a world prominent position (see Fig. 5). Some other developing countries, such as India, Russia, and Iran, which have also recognized the strategic importance of quantum technology and continue making more efforts in this area (Fedorov et al., 2019; Padma, 2020; Salehi, 2021), have shown increasing participation in quantum research, significantly eroding the developed countries’ lead (i.e. Germany, Japan, England, Italy) in the global quantum technology race.