Bioscience Research: China to Overtake U.S. by 2020

Bioscience research in China is set to overtake the United States within the next five to ten years, according to data from search engine CiteAb.

CiteAb’s founder Dr Andrew Chalmers said that data highlighting the number of academic research papers using antibodies produced by each country “clearly shows that China is the big winner at the moment. The United States has been the most productive nation in bioscience research for a long time, but has seen a gradual decrease in output since 2010.”

He added: “Conversely, China’s output has been growing enormously since around 2009 and if current trends continue we expect to see China overtake the USA by as soon as 2020. To counter this, the USA will need to increase investment in bioscience research.”

Data published by the company also suggests that Japan’s share of the world’s bioscience output has gradually fallen since 2009. Germany and Britain appear to remain stable, said Chalmers, “so they are likely to become the third and fourth most active bioscience research nations as Japan drops down.”

Bioscience research funding increased in China by 33 per cent a year between 2007 and 2012, whereas the U.S. has seen a decrease of 2 per cent a year. Chalmers added: “We know that China’s most recent five year plan makes research in this sector a priority for 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.”

CiteAb, an antibody search engine listing over 1.8million antibodies and ranking them by over 300,000 academic citations, spun out from the University of Bath, UK, earlier this year.

The company’s first market report is available here: http://blog.citeab.com/first-citeab-market-report-puts-spotlight-on-chinese-bioscience-growth