China’s increasing leadership in scientific collaboration

Abstract

This paper studies the evolution of China’s international collaboration from 1980 to 2016, in terms of collaborating countries, topics, and citations. We also distinguish between papers that are led by a Chinese author (i.e., the first or corresponding author has a Chinese affiliation) and the papers to China contributed (i.e., the first and corresponding authors are not affiliated to a Chinese institution). We find an important increase of international collaboration by Chinese scholars over the period. Chinese authors are also increasingly playing a leadership role in those international collaborations, but this varies by discipline and by country of collaboration. We observe that the papers led by Chinese authors have on average a lower citation impact than the papers to which they participated as non-leaders.