A bad reputation and cultural ignorance are probably responsible
Chinese authors published as many papers as American, British, German and Japanese researchers combined in 2025. Yet two recent analyses drawing on databases of tens of millions of English-language scientific articles suggest they were largely overlooked by Western researchers. That is not for lack of value: China leads the Nature index, a ranking of countries by number of papers published in a set of respected journals.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Doctors with borders”
From the June 13th 2026 edition
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