U.S. still first in science, but China rising fast as funding stalls in U.S., other countries
publications, as well as China’s leap from outside the top 10 in 2000 to fourth place in 2015. They also track the major increases in support for research in South Korea and Singapore since the start of the twenty-first Century.
Meticulous tracking
First author of the study, U-M informationist Marisa Conte, and Omary co-led a team that looked carefully at the currency of modern science: peer-reviewed basic science and clinical research papers describing new findings, published in journals with long histories of accepting among the world’s most significant discoveries.
They reviewed every issue of six top-tier international journals (JAMA, Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Nature and Science), and four mid-ranking journals (British Medical Journal, JAMA Internal Medicine, Journal of Cell Science, FASEB Journal), chosen to represent the clinical and basic science aspects of research.
The analysis included only papers that reported new results from basic research experiments, translational studies, clinical trials, metanalyses, and studies of disease outcomes. Author affiliations for corresponding authors and all other authors were recorded by country.
The rise in global cooperation is striking. In 2000, 25 percent of papers in the six top-tier journals were by teams that included researchers from at least two countries. In 2015, that figure was closer to 50 percent. The increasing need for multidisciplinary approaches to make major advances, coupled with the advances of Internet-based collaboration tools, likely have something to do with this, Omary says.
The authors, who also include Santiago Schnell, Ph.D. and Jing Liu, Ph.D., note that part of their group’s interest in doing the study sprang from their hypothesis that a flat NIH budget is likely to have negative consequences but they wanted to gather data to test their hypothesis.
They also observed what appears to be an increasing number of Chinese-born scientists who had trained in the United States going back to China after their training, where once most of them would have sought to stay in the United States In addition, Singapore has been able to recruit several top-notch U.S. and other international scientists due to their marked increase in R&D investments.
The same trends appear to be happening in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and other countries the authors studied – where research investing has stayed consistent when measured as a percentage of the U.S. total over the last fifteen years.
The authors note that their study is based on data up to 2015, and that in the current 2017 federal fiscal year, funding for NIH has increased thanks to bipartisan Congressional appropriations. The NIH contributes to most of the federal support for medical and basic biomedical research in the United States But discussion of cuts to research funding that hinders many federal agencies is in the air during the current debates for the 2018 budget. Meanwhile, the Chinese R&D spending is projected to surpass the U.S. total by 2022.
“Our analysis, albeit limited to a small number of representative journals, supports the importance of financial investment in research,” Omary says. “I would still strongly encourage any child interested in science to pursue their dream and passion, but I hope that our current and future investment in NIH and other federal research support agencies will rise above any branch of government to help our next generation reach their potential and dreams.”
Omary is professor of physiology and internal medicine at the U-M Medical School, where Schnell is professor of physiology and computational medicine and bioinformatics. Conte is the Assistant Director, Research and Informatics, at U-M’s Taubman Health Sciences Library, and Liu is a research specialist at the Michigan Institute for Data Science.
— Marisa L. Conte et al., “Globalization and changing trends of biomedical research output,” JCI Insights (15 June 2017) (doi: 10.1172/jci.insight.95206)
