Understanding Chinese science: New scientometric perspectives

China’s rise in science has aroused great interest in the research community and captured the attention of policy makers around the world. With its tremendous increase in research investment, fast growing SciTech workforce, and broadened access to international collaboration, China has become one of the most important contributors to global scientific knowledge. In 2016, China surpassed the United States as the largest producer of scientific articles indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database (Tollefson, 2018; NSB, 2018). In terms of scientific articles indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), China surpassed the US as the number one knowledge producer in 2018 (Zhu & Liu, 2020).