Credit: Xinhua/Shutterstock
China’s contribution to world-class science is advancing so quickly that its lead over the United States in the Nature Index database has multiplied by more than four times in the space of just one year, according to calendar-year data for 2024.
It was only in 2023 that the United States lost the top spot to China in the Research Leaders list, which ranks countries, territories and institutions based on their contributions to papers in 145 high-quality health-sciences and natural-sciences journals.
But the gap between the two countries threatens to become a chasm very quickly; China has topped the list with a Share (the main Nature Index metric that tracks author contribution to research articles in the database) of 32,122 in 2024. The United States’ Share was 22,083.
China’s adjusted Share — which takes account of annual fluctuations in the volume of articles in the database year-on-year — jumped by 17.4% in the year to 2023. At the same time, the United States’ adjusted Share plummeted by 10.1%.
The largest US reduction in adjusted Share, of 11.6%, was in chemistry, followed by the physical sciences (10.6%). In the health sciences, a field that the United States still leads, its decline was less steep, at 2.7%. The United States has also retained first place in the biological sciences, but its adjusted Share fell by 5.4%, while China’s rose by more than one-fifth (20.4%).
The United States is not the only Western research system to be impacted by the rapid rise of China: Canada, France and the United Kingdom all suffered falls in their adjusted Share of at least 9%.
Although China’s rise and the West’s decline in Share has been a continuing pattern in the Nature Index for several years, the acceleration of this trend has prompted science-policy watchers to question how big the gap will grow.
Joanne Carney, the chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), was stark in her warning that the United States had “clearly crossed a threshold into actively abdicating our position as a global leader in research and development and innovation”. She says the United States does “still have a window for stemming the tide, but we’ll need to act fast”.
That might not be an easy task, however. With a population roughly four times bigger than that of the United States, China has been outpacing the United States for science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) PhD graduates since the early 2000s, according to a 2021 report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Data on the number of PhD graduates in 2025 is unlikely to be available for a few years, but the CSET report predicted that Chinese universities would produce about 77,000 STEM PhD graduates per year by 2025, compared with 40,000 per year from their US counterparts.
“China now employs more researchers than both America and the entire EU [European Union] combined,” says Stephen Ezell, vice-president for global innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a science-policy think tank in Washington DC. “If America is going to hold ground, we’re going to have to recognize that the race is real.”
Disrupter in chief
These trends and data predate the January 2025 inauguration, of US president, Donald Trump. But his administration’s policies have already severely disrupted US higher education and research, says Caroline Wagner, a science policy and innovation researcher at Ohio State University in Columbus, which potentially makes it harder to keep pace with China. “We’re going through a national crisis,” she warns. “It’s more than a malaise.”
On 2 May, the White House released a budget proposal to cover 2026. The document alleged that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) had “broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health”. The NIH is set to see its funding slashed by almost US$18 billion, which equates to roughly 40% of its annual budget.
“If Congress enacts the President’s skinny budget, the consequences for the future of our nation would be catastrophic,” said Sudip Parikh, AAAS chief executive office, in an online statement. “The United States will no longer be in the global race for R&D leadership — we will have lost it.”
Other research funding agencies in the United States will have to endure similar cuts. The Environmental Protection Agency would lose 55% of its budget and the National Science Foundation stands to lose 57%.
Individual universities are also at risk of losing vast amounts of funding from the federal government, and not just because they receive research grants from such agencies. The most prominent example has been Harvard University, which has butted heads with the White House over pro-Palestinian protests on the university’s campus. Trump has called such protests “illegal” and accused participants of being anti-Semitic. The government froze US$2.2 billion of federal funds for Harvard in April after the university refused to comply with a list of the Trump administration’s demands, that included instructions over how the institution should govern, hire and teach. The stand-off has since escalated with further federal funds cut or frozen, while the White House also wants to revoke the university’s ability to enrol international students. Many of these actions are being fought by Harvard in the courts.
Searching for alternatives
There are some reports that private funders in the United States have increased their research spending in response to the government’s austerity. Ezell is calling on the Trump administration to come up with policies that would further encourage the private sector to participate in science research. “We need to implement smart tax policies that incentivize businesses to invest in R&D,” he says.
It is unlikely, however, that private investments will ever be sufficient to fully plug the hole, says Ezell. “It’s certainly not a given that that will happen in the absence of stronger incentives.”
At an event last month hosted by the US National Academy of Sciences, Michael Kratsios, science advisor to the president and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, defended the government’s actions. “Political biases have displaced the vital search for truth,” he said. “Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things.”
But Ezell says that a more targeted approach to the government’s research spending is also unlikely to produce enough savings to make up for the loss. “The Trump administration will likely make a relative shift from social science to core science research funding, but that wouldn’t be enough to offset a drop in overall funding.”
The combination of funding cuts and the crackdown on DEI policies and research has led some US scientists to conclude that their “career is over”. On top of that, some foreign scientists — including those with US visas — have been detained at airports and denied entry to the country. “It sends out of signals to foreign researchers to look for a job somewhere else,” says Wagner.
West to East brain drain
That risks causing a brain drain, whereby the United States is no longer a destination for scientists — creating a potential recruitment source for other countries, says Wagner. The same is true, she says, for researchers based abroad who are looking for research collaborators; they want to invest their time and effort in a partner who operates under stable funding and predictable politics.
Data from the Nature Index have previously suggested that China-based researchers are increasing their collaboration with scientists in other Asian countries while partnerships between China and the United States have been waning. This is helping to develop the research strengths of other Asian nations, something that that can be seen in the latest calendar-year data in the Nature Index.
South Korea, for example, moved up from eighth to seventh in Research Leaders 2025, and grew its adjusted Share in the biological sciences by more than 11%. The nation also jumped from sixth place to fourth place in the physical sciences.
Singapore also stands out for its recent performance. Its adjusted Share in Earth and environmental sciences papers grew by more than 19% from 2023 to 2024, and its adjusted Share in the health sciences rose by more than 23%.
The success of other Asian countries might also reflect a focus on green technology and materials, areas that are representing an increasing proportion of research articles in the database.
The jury is out, say Carney and Wagner, as to whether the United States can successfully ameliorate the growing sense of managed decline. It’s theoretically possible, they say, but the outlook is far from rosy, and it could very well be that we’re already in a transition of science and research leadership from the West to the East.
Organizations like AAAS are meanwhile lobbying the US government to rethink its funding cuts. The risk, they say, is that the United States and the West doesn’t get to define the rules and standards for emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, which would have both economic and national security implications. “We have a short window. I think we only have this year and next year to turn it around,” says Carney.
