博主按:点击以下链接可看到文中的图。

20230307-1985-2004-2020 publication forecast.doc

       我们这项预测是大大低估了中国的科技进步。自从2006年公布了国家中长期科技规划（2006-2020）之后，我国科技事业很多方面都呈现起飞之势。我们根据长期趋势外推，中国2000的SCI论文数将达到9.5万篇，事实上达到了55.3万篇。不过，原先的统计依据是SCI光盘版，是收录最严的版本；后来的统计依据是WOS，是网络版，收录尺度相对要宽松些。严格说来，二者无法相互比较。

Forecast and Estimation of China’s Publication Productivity in 2020 （草于2005年）

Ma Zheng and Wu Yishan

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC)

1 Introduction

The Chinese government is developing its Mid-to-Long Term Science and Technology Plan Outline until 2020. In this context, we would like to know the status of China in the world in terms of publication productivity. 

In this analysis, we compare the publication data with those of other 10 countries, including USA, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Canada, Korea and India.    

2 Data Source, Analysis Method and Tool

The data used in this analysis are drawn from Web of Science 2004 and Annual Statistics and Analysis Report of China Scientific and Technical Papers (1985-2003) made by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC).

In this analysis, the main method used is times-series approach. Both the number and the share of the above-mentioned 11 countries’ publications are used to calculate the moving averages. The high and low estimates of each country’s SCI amount in year 2020 are given. The software tool used here is Microsoft Excel.

3 Results

Based on time series data on SCI papers from 1985 to 2004, a forecast for 11countries’ publication output is made, as shown in Table 1. It could be seen that the rank of all the 11 countries remain the same. USA will still have much more papers (nearly 460,000) than other nations. Britain, Japan and Germany will all produce more than 100,000 papers. China’s output will be close to 100,000. Its rank will be the same as France (China leaped over France to become fifth most productive nation in 2004), with both countries having similar number of papers and similar annual growth rate.

It is worth noticing that along with China, Korea and Spain are non-English countries, but these 3 countries will improve their number of papers with high annual growth rate (3.2%, 3.6% and 3.8% respectively). In comparison, USA and Canada, as English countries, will witness their low growth rate (both at 1.9%).  It seems that in the future, linguistic barriers will not be as severe as today for publishing in internationally influential journals.  

Table 1 Forecasted Paper Amount of 11 Nations in 2020

Based on time series data on the world share of each country’s SCI papers from 1985 to 2004, another forecast for 2020 publication output is made, as shown in Table 2. The data on Total SCI Papers is also calculated with times-series method.

USA will still have much more papers and higher share (nearly 24%) than other nations. Japan, Germany, and Britain will each take more than 9% of the world total. China’s output will be close to 9%.

After China, the rank of France and Italy will remain the same but Korea and Spain will improve their ranks. Here again, as revealed in Table 1, China, Spain and Korea, 3 non-English countries, will increase their shares from now to year 2020. In comparison, Canada and India, as English countries, will witness their share of papers decline. 

Table 2 Forecasted Share of 11 Nations in World Total in 2020

According to the figures in Table1 and Table2, We can give the possible range of 11 countries’ SCI paper amount in 2020. From Figure 1 we can find that China’s paper output will keep 5^th place in spite of the possible wide range in its number of papers.

We could forecast China’s paper output in another way. Figure 2 is the distribution in annual growth rate of SCI papers for all the countries in the world. It can be seen that between 5% to 9% of the countries (the largest share) have their growth rates fall between 3% and 7%. That is to say, roughly a quarter of the all countries are in this range. Suppose China’s SCI papers will grow at 4~6% (mid-range figures among 3~7% range) from now to 2020, then China will produce between 107466 to 145758 papers, at the same magnitude as the former forecasts. 

Acknowledgement

This project was supported by a grant (70373055) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC)