Emerging economies showed some of the largest increases in research output in 2018, according to estimates from the publishing-services company Clarivate Analytics. Egypt and Pakistan topped the list in percentage terms, with rises of 21 percent and 15.9 percent, respectively.
China's publications rose by about 15 percent, and India, Brazil, Mexico and Iran all saw their output grow by more than 8 percent compared with 2017.
Globally, research output rose by around 5 percent in 2018, to an estimated 1,620,731 papers listed in a vast science-citation database Web of Science, the highest ever.
In 1980, only 5 countries did 90 percent of all science - the US, the UK, France, Germany and Japan. Now there are 20 countries within the top producing group.
The estimates were compiled for Nature by Clarivate, which owns Web of Science, and the analysis focused on 40 countries that have at least 10,000 papers in the database. The whole-year projections are based on the number of research and review papers published between January and August, because there is a time lag between papers being published and them appearing in the database.
The figures might also reflect changes in how the database is curated, which has added more local or national journals to the mix. But some geographical regions, notably in Africa, are still under-represented.
Increases in funding and international collaborations might also have boosted the rise in publications in Egypt and Pakistan.
In China, the gains follow two decades of strong policy-driven growth in science and higher education.
It is expected that China might soon overtake the US to become the largest producer of publications - it is now only about 35,000 papers short. By some measures, China has already overtaken the US.
The quality of China's science in terms of citations is also increasing. But for this to continue, the country will need to remain open to global influences. China's censorship of Internet sources has left scientists complaining of blocked databases and limited Internet searches.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a trusted global partner for digital content transformation solutions - Abstracting & Indexing (A&I), Knowledge Modeling (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies), and Metadata Enrichment & Entity Extraction.
