https://physicsworld.com/a/china-overtakes-the-us-in-terms-of-research-quality-finds-study/

Physics World: China research overtakes the US not just quantity, but also quality. Strange how a bunch of unoriginal plagiarists and thieves are doing such high quality work in abundance 物理世界：中國研究超越美國，不僅數量，而且質量。奇怪的是一群非原創的抄襲者和小偷如何大量做如此高質量的工作 – SF Bay Area China Group

The quality of China’s scientific research output exceeded that of the US in 2019. That is according to a new analysis by researchers in the US, which also found that China had already overtaken the European Union in terms of research quality by 2015.

China’s total research output has grown rapidly in recent years, but there has been a widespread belief that the “quality” – judged by the number of citations papers receive – is not as high as other countries. A common measure of a nation’s research quality is the percentage of its papers appearing in the top 1% of the most-cited papers globally. Since citation practices vary widely across disciplines, researchers typically weight the citation data of papers according to their fields, before comparing countries’ scientific output. When comparing field-weighted citation data, the US has a higher percentage of research in the top 1% worldwide than China does.

Although this weighting practice makes sense when comparing papers from different fields, Caroline Wagner of Ohio State University argues that it is not appropriate when comparing the overall research outputs of different countries. Together with Lin Zhang of Wuhan University and Loet Leydesdorff of the University of Amsterdam, Wagner analysed citation data contained in the database Web of Science and used the unweighted data to quantify different countries’ research quality.

They found that 1.67% of papers with Chinese authors were in the top 1% most-cited articles in 2019 compared with 1.62% of papers with US authors.