So, I found out that new Scimago country-level data came out on the 1st of this month, showing the amount of scientific documents published by each country and territory watched by them (which is just about all of them).
www.scimagojr.com
Tl;dr, it's even more brutal for the West than I had expected
.
Top 20 countries in 2021:
Top countries in 2022:
First, the obvious. China, already a leading nation in this area, grew by over 16% in a single year, becoming the first ever nation to break the one million benchmark on this list. This is an even faster growth than they usually have. I've done some calculations on this data (I can share that as well if anyone's interested), but in the 2015-2021 period, their annual growth in this area was 9.95%. Over 16% is honestly a bit crazy, almost like two of their average years in this period together, and if it holds even for a year more... yeah.
On the other hand, the USA, China's main rival, definitely took a beating in this new ranking. For some reason (I think probably because of the inflation and general economic problems in 2022) it, along with a bunch of other, mostly Western countries, actually published less research in 2022 than in 2021. This is an even bigger problem than it seems. I did the same calculation I did with China on the US as well, and their average growth in the 2015-2021 period was 0.67%. The loss US experienced here is pretty much equivalent to having six years' worth of progress just deleted, sending them back to where they last were in 2015, publishing barely over 700,000 documents.
Even if they fully recover next year and jump straight to where they should be without this weird fall... that's still not going to put them anywhere near even 750,000, while China seems poised to just continue surging forward. On the other hand, If this publishing slump turns out to somehow not be just a temporary freak occurence destined to be deleted by the next year, and the countries affected by this will actually have to crawl back to where they were before... then that's just a pure nightmare scenario for the US. As I already mentioned, it took them from 2015 to 2021 to go from over 700,000 published documents to over 730,000, and now they are back to where they were years ago, with no sign that their tiny growth rate is about to get better. That would put them in a position where for the next six years they'll just be trying to get back to where they were in 2021, while China, given its insane growth rates (just below 10% in the 2015-2021 period, over 16% from 2021 to 2022 for some reason) might even end up doubling their output by then.
Speaking of that weird slump in publications, as I've already mentioned, it's mostly Western countries affected by it. UK published less in 2022 than in 2021, which helped India (which has grown) overtake it and claim the third spot. The only unambiguously Western country in the top 20 not affected by this is Australia, while South Korea is Western-aligned and has also grown. Apart from those three and China, the only countries in the top 20 that grew in this regard are Brazil, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the last of which has entered the top 20 for possibly the first time.
SJR - International Science Ranking
www.scimagojr.com
Tl;dr, it's even more brutal for the West than I had expected
.Top 20 countries in 2021:
Top countries in 2022:
First, the obvious. China, already a leading nation in this area, grew by over 16% in a single year, becoming the first ever nation to break the one million benchmark on this list. This is an even faster growth than they usually have. I've done some calculations on this data (I can share that as well if anyone's interested), but in the 2015-2021 period, their annual growth in this area was 9.95%. Over 16% is honestly a bit crazy, almost like two of their average years in this period together, and if it holds even for a year more... yeah
.On the other hand, the USA, China's main rival, definitely took a beating in this new ranking. For some reason (I think probably because of the inflation and general economic problems in 2022) it, along with a bunch of other, mostly Western countries, actually published less research in 2022 than in 2021. This is an even bigger problem than it seems. I did the same calculation I did with China on the US as well, and their average growth in the 2015-2021 period was 0.67%. The loss US experienced here is pretty much equivalent to having six years' worth of progress just deleted, sending them back to where they last were in 2015, publishing barely over 700,000 documents.
Even if they fully recover next year and jump straight to where they should be without this weird fall... that's still not going to put them anywhere near even 750,000, while China seems poised to just continue surging forward. On the other hand, If this publishing slump turns out to somehow not be just a temporary freak occurence destined to be deleted by the next year, and the countries affected by this will actually have to crawl back to where they were before... then that's just a pure nightmare scenario for the US. As I already mentioned, it took them from 2015 to 2021 to go from over 700,000 published documents to over 730,000, and now they are back to where they were years ago, with no sign that their tiny growth rate is about to get better. That would put them in a position where for the next six years they'll just be trying to get back to where they were in 2021, while China, given its insane growth rates (just below 10% in the 2015-2021 period, over 16% from 2021 to 2022 for some reason) might even end up doubling their output by then
.Speaking of that weird slump in publications, as I've already mentioned, it's mostly Western countries affected by it. UK published less in 2022 than in 2021, which helped India (which has grown) overtake it and claim the third spot. The only unambiguously Western country in the top 20 not affected by this is Australia, while South Korea is Western-aligned and has also grown. Apart from those three and China, the only countries in the top 20 that grew in this regard are Brazil, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, the last of which has entered the top 20 for possibly the first time.
