As per the 2018 Science and Engineering Indicators report published by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which tracks innumerable markers of scientific achievement and scale across countries, China has overtaken US in scientific output for the first time.
In 2016, China published over 426,000 scientific studies (research papers, patents etc) indexed by Elsevier’s Scopus database – accounting for about 18.6 percent of the international total. For the first time, the US came in second, notching up 409,000 published papers.
By financial measures, the US spends most on research and development (R&D) – US$496 billion, 26 percent share of the global total. However, China is not far behind, with its R&D expenditure rapidly swelling by an average of 18 percent annually since 2000 (US was only 4 percent), to where it now commits US$408 billion (21 percent of the global total).
It is pertinent to mention that a patent is a government authority or licence conferring a right or title for a set period, especially the sole right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention.
However, a research paper analyses a perspective or argues a point. When you write a research paper you build upon what you know about the subject and make a deliberate attempt to find out what experts know. A research paper involves surveying a field of knowledge in order to find the best possible information in that field.
