China is pulling ahead

https://www.science.org/content/article/china-now-tops-u-s-r-d-spending-one-key-measure

China now tops the U.S. in R&D spending by one key measure

China reached long expected milestone in 2024.

Still, the OECD analysis suggests China has hit “a significant milestone,” one “in a series of indicators showing China’s increasing strength as a world scientific superpower, if not the world superpower,” says Caroline Wagner, a science policy scholar at Ohio State University. She notes that in 2022, China edged out the U.S. in the number of most cited papers. In 2024, China surpassed the U.S. in the total number of publications indexed in the Web of Science database. The same year China topped the U.S. in the number of papers listed in the Nature Index, which tracks publications in 145 leading science journals.