According to some numbers crunched by Thomson Reuters, China will be the world's leader in production of scientific knowledge by 2020. The announcement came after Reuters compared 4 emerging scientific leaders; those being India, Brazil, Russia and China.

China was found to be far ahead of the 3 other candidates, and is set to overtake the U.S.A. in 10 years.

The 3 main reasons cited were, huge government investments at all levels of research (school & post-doc), an organised flow of knowledge from basic science to commercial applications (not really sure what they mean), and lastly China's increasing ability to head-hunt mid-career scientists that had previously left the country to persue research elsewhere.

The Financial Times article mentions the quality of the Chinese research papers are still "mixed".

As long as this doesn't mean outright scientific fraud, I say more power to them.

Tags: china, science, research, global, papers, studies, chemistry, materials science, mathematics,