Information services provider Thomson Reuters, US, has released an analysis, according to which the Asia Pacific region has become the dominant producer of research papers in chemistry. The region contributed about 43 percent of research papers published in the internationally influential journals indexed by Thomson Reuters.
The study found that the region's world share of published papers in chemistry has more than doubled in the last 30 years (up from 19 percent in 1981). Much of Asia Pacific's dramatic increase can be attributed to China, whose output in chemistry increased from a world share of 0.3 percent in 1981 to just over 20 percent now. The European Union and the United States have dropped significantly in their world share of research output since the mid-1990s, and now stand at 32 percent and 18 percent respectively.
While China is driving the region's increased output in chemistry, it is Singapore that excels in research impact as measured by average citations to its chemistry papers in Asia Pacific.
Of the top 10 nations in Asia Pacific that published at least 3,000 papers in chemistry journals during 2000-2010 and ranked by citations per paper (citation impact), Australia was placed second (16th globally) and Japan was placed third (19th globally).
During 2000-2010, Singapore published 100 chemistry papers that qualified as highly cited, meaning that for their field and year of publication they ranked in the top 1 percent worldwide by total citations. Of the 100, the National University of Singapore (NUS) published 64, the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) published 29, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) research institutes, including the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, the Institute of Microelectronics, and the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, published 23 (the total of these surpass 100 owing to co-authorship).
Data from Thomson Reuters Essential Science Indicators were extracted for this analysis.
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