China citations boost from Covid research ‘closes gap with US’

The huge impact of some of China’s early research into Covid-19 and Sars-CoV-2 looks to have helped it close the gap even further on its citation performance with US, the latest data suggest.

According to figures taken from Elsevier’s Scopus database of indexed research, papers related to the novel coronavirus published by China have had a citation impact of almost 17 times the world average, the largest of any major research nation.

With the publication record for 2020 almost complete, the current indications are that China’s overall field-weighted citation impact (FWCI), which allows for variations in citing patterns by discipline, publication type and year, rose to 1.15 last year from 1.08 in 2019. Meanwhile, on current figures, the US has fallen to 1.31 from 1.37.  

Chinese researchers were heavily involved in initial research into the new coronavirus after it rapidly spread in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019 and early 2020, including papers in high-impact journals that quickly became the cornerstones of evolving scientific understanding.

M’hamed el Aisati, Elsevier’s vice-president for research analytics and data services, told Times Higher Education that China’s FWCI on Covid research was so high that it would definitely have boosted its overall performance.

He added that the overall FWCI increase for China of 0.07 points from 2019 to 2020 was also “significant for a research-intensive nation like China, especially if you look at previous years where the growth has been 0.03 to 0.04 points on average”.

However, Mr el Aisati said the “real question is how sustainable that FWCI boost actually is” given that much of China’s Covid research came in the initial stages of the pandemic.

For instance, current data from Scopus indicate that coronavirus research only made up around 1 per cent of China’s total 2020 output, lower than that of most other major research nations, including the US, whose Covid-related papers represented around 2.5 per cent of its overall research volume last year.

If other countries “continue publishing proportionally more than China about Covid-19, they will get a boost themselves – which might eventually be higher, proportionally speaking. This boost will likely help sustain the gap between China’s FWCI and theirs,” Mr el Aisati said.

Previous projections, made before the pandemic, have suggested that the gap in citation impact between China and the US could close by the middle of the decade.

Jenny Lee, professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, said even if the closing gap intensified the sense of a research race between the nations, there was unlikely to be any slowdown in “US-China co-publications [or] resultant citations”.

“It’s highly unlikely that any global rivalry between the two countries would lead to fewer citations overall,” she said. “Policies are directed towards the production, not in the citation, of new knowledge.” 

Her research colleague at Arizona, John Haupt, also said that the citations boost gained by collaborative research was an additional incentive for researchers from the countries to continue working closely together.

Meanwhile, Mr el Aisati added that China was not the only country with early high-impact research on Covid-19 that seemed to have received a boost to its overall citation impact in 2020. Italy’s FWCI for 2020 is currently showing as 1.6, up from 1.42 in 2019.

simon.baker@timehighereducation.com