Historical science strongholds grapple with challenging conditions, while emerging contenders make their mark.

18 June 2024

India is making rapid progress for research output in the Nature Index and last year had a higher percentage growth in contributions to index journals than China, according to the latest release of calendar-year data.

The Nature Index 2024 Research Leaders – previously known as Annual Tables – is a series of rankings that highlight the leading countries, territories and research institutions for output in the database. The rankings show that India has overtaken Australia and Switzerland to sit in 9th place overall. In the natural sciences, the country is now 8th.

Since the Nature Index was introduced in 2014, China has been the standout country for growth in Share, a metric that measures contribution to papers in the Index by authors based in a particular location. In 2022, China overtook the United States as the leading country for natural-sciences output. In 2023, a year after health-sciences journals were added to the Index, China was top overall.

India’s overall Share for 2023 was 1,494.27 — which is much lower than China’s, at 23,171.84 — but its growth is now mirroring its Asian peer. From 2022 to 2023, India recorded an increase of 14.5% in its adjusted Share, a metric that takes account of annual fluctuations in the number of Nature Index articles each year. China, by comparison, had a growth in adjusted Share of 13.6%. Many leading Western countries continued to record dips in adjusted Share: the United Kingdom fell by 8.2%, the United States by 7.1% and Germany by 6.8%.

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India’s success might be partly explained by its growing number of research institutions. “In the past decade, the number of universities has jumped from 752 to 1,016,” says Chittenipattu Rajendran, a seismologist at the National Institute of Advanced Sciences in Bengaluru, who also writes about science policy for The Wire publication. During this time, the Indian Institutes of Technology — the country’s network of education and research centres — grew from five to 23, says Rajendran, and seven new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research have been established.

Subbiah Arunachalam, a visiting researcher at the DST Centre for Policy Research at the Indian Institute of Science, in Bengaluru, agrees that the expansion has played an important role in India’s rapid rise in the Index. “These institutions attract a new generation of scientists,” he says, “many having done their doctoral and postdoctoral work in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe”.

The second reason, says Arunachalam, is the availability of a large number of scholarships and fellowships that have been made available to students wanting to pursue a PhD, and in some cases master’s and undergraduate programmes. “The government has instituted special programmes to attract students to science and technology, right from the school level,” he says.

Nature Index data appear to back up the suggestion that an increased number of research institutions could be helping. India has far fewer research institutions in the top 500 compared with China — 15, compared with more than 100 in China — but it does have dozens that are making a small contribution to papers tracked by the index. India appears to be particularly strong in chemistry research, with the subject making up almost 60% of its total Nature Index output. In the global ranking for chemistry, India is ranked 6th.

“Traditionally, India is strong in chemistry. [Look at] our millennia-old interest in ethnobotany and plant-based medical systems,” says Arunachalam. “The Indian chemical industry is doing very well and has exceeded shareholder expectations across all regions.”

India’s growth in the Nature Index is impressive, but Rajendran says further steps are needed on science policy. “This rapid escalation in the number of institutions does not correlate with the science budget,” he says. Although India’s total research expenditure from government and non-government sources more than doubled in absolute terms from 2010-11 to 2020-21, as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) it has been falling year on year since 2009. The most recent statistics put it at 0.64% of GDP in 2020–21. Rajendran also argues that much of what is spent is being used to develop eye-catching projects, rather than supporting fundamental research.

Ajay Sood, the Indian government’s principal scientific adviser, says that the “full picture” does not warrant such criticism, highlighting investment in areas such as quantum research, earmarked for 60 billion rupees (US$ 720 million) in funding over eight years through the National Quantum Mission. He also says increasing funding from private sources in India — which contribute around 40% to total research spending, a relatively low figure by international standards — is crucial. “I’m not saying we don’t need to increase funding, but we need to encourage the private sector,” Sood says, pointing to plans for the country’s new Anusandhan National Research Foundation to leverage funding from non-government sources.

Western drift

As Asia’s emerging powerhouses continue to perform well in the Nature Index, the picture is less rosy in Europe and North America (although due to the database being a relatively fixed set of articles, increases in Share for some countries naturally lead to decreases elsewhere).

Even in the biological sciences, where the United States has maintained a clear advantage over China, there appear to be signs of an end to Western dominance. Although the sheer number of biological-science papers produced by US scientists still far outstrips those authored in China, the data point to a changing landscape. From 2022 to 2023, the United States’ adjusted Share in biological sciences fell by 4.3% as China’s grew by 21.8%. It’s a similar story for health sciences; the United States’ adjusted Share is down by 1.5% and China’s is up by 14.6%.

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Part of the United States’ fall might be due to journal changes in the database in 2023. Biological-sciences journal eLife was removed from the Nature Index after changing its publishing model, for instance. But the overall direction of travel is clear. John LaMattina, a former president of global research and development at Pfizer, based in New York City thinks the general economic outlook is partly at fault. Some scientists have blamed inflation for the spiralling cost of doing research in the United States — one audit in 2022 found that the cost of lab supplies had risen by 27% since 2018 — while funding has failed to keep pace.

Also of note is a new law in the United States, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which will introduce a price limit in 2026 for 10 drugs that the government-run healthcare service, Medicare, will pay.

The aim of the bill, its proponents say, is to limit the country’s spiralling medical fees. Relative to the size of the US economy, healthcare costs have grown from 5% of GDP in 1962 to 17% in 2022, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, in New York City. By 2030, the price-control rules will be extended to cover 60 drugs. That, says LaMattina, is influencing pharmaceutical companies’ willingness and capacity to spend on research. “The act will start to have an impact. We’ve seen tremendous layoffs, with the likes of Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb closing research sites, and I think that’s in anticipation of reduced revenues. They’re tightening their belts.”

LaMattina, who sits on the board of three biotech companies, says he can already see the knock-on effect of this for the wider drug-development industry. “Start-up companies don’t need a lot of money very early on, but once they do clinical trials, the costs jack up. Companies getting to that point need funds, and investment usually comes from larger pharmaceutical companies,” he says. “At the moment, it’s very much a buyer’s market. Companies are saying, ‘Come back to us with more data,’ but five years ago, if you had a promising pre-clinical programme, you might have had multiple bidders.”

Shifting patterns in international research collaboration are also likely to be having an effect on the performance of the United States and other Western nations in the Nature Index.

According to a data analysis carried out for the Nature Index supplement on China published in June, there has been an increase in connections between China and countries that are part of its Belt and Road initiative to improve trade and infrastructure links within Asia and beyond. At the same time, previous data have shown that the contribution of US-China collaborations to Nature Index articles has fallen. “It’s not a complete shift away from the West,” says Jenny Lee, a science-policy researcher at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. But the combination paints a picture in which there is a “shift in the centre of gravity towards regional collaborations in Asia”, she says.

Japanese renaissance

Japan had been experiencing steep declines in contributions to the Nature Index for much of the past decade — its adjusted Share in natural sciences fell by close to 20% between 2017 and 2022. But there are signs that the country might have steadied the ship. With a drop in adjusted Share of 1.7% from 2022 to 2023, Japan’s deterioration was moderate compared with many European and North American countries.

The country has enjoyed a spate of success in creating spin-off companies and in 2021 unveiled plans for an endowment scheme worth US$75 billion to fund science and research. It may take more time for the effects of these changes to be felt at the coalface of research, however, and not everyone is convinced that Japanese research is out the woods. “Most Japanese researchers would not believe that Japan’s science competitiveness is really on the revival track,” says Keiji Nashida, a geneticist at Kobe University, in Hyōgo. “I am not optimistic that the trend will continue, as we are just surviving on the assets we have, and have not yet been successful in attracting and nurturing young people.”

Brexit effect?

The impact of geopolitics on science has been a key concern for UK researchers after the country voted in a 2016 referendum to leave the European Union. It has taken years of negotiation to bring the United Kingdom into the EU’s €95.5 billion (US$102.7 billion) Horizon Europe science-funding programme, a process that was bedevilled by delays but ultimately led to an agreement in January 2024. The delay has had a deleterious impact on British science, says Martin Smith, head of the policy lab at the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation based in London. “There is some post-Brexit hiatus effect,” he says.

Data from the Nature Index Research Leaders 2024 appear to support this. Much of Europe saw its overall Share in the Index decrease in 2023, but in specific areas, the United Kingdom often fared worse than its continental counterparts.

In the biological sciences, for example, the United Kingdom’s adjusted Share decreased by 3.8%, while Germany’s increased by 0.4%. It’s a comparable picture for Earth and environmental sciences, where the United Kingdom’s adjusted Share declined slightly by 0.4%, but Germany’s increased by 6.3%. The same is true for chemistry, in which both countries experienced a decrease, but the United Kingdom’s was more severe.

When it comes to performance in high-quality science, “this is a reminder that you need to run to keep still”, says Smith. “Lots of countries are looking to be a science superpower, and to keep up with that, we need to keep our foot on the accelerator. We can’t rest on our laurels because of former glories, because other countries are accelerating.”

The Nature Index assesses publication outputs, which means there’s a delay between the onset of certain factors, such as being excluded from a European funding programme, and their manifestation in the data. This is a natural consequence of the lengthy time it takes to get science from the lab through to publication. If Brexit is to blame for some of the United Kingdom’s lacklustre performance in the Nature Index 2024 Research Leaders, it’s likely to persist for a couple more years before we might see an uptick from joining Horizon Europe, says Smith. “It’ll take a while to filter through.”

There have also been significant increases in UK science funding in recent years, which Smith hopes will start to show up in Nature Index data. In 2021, the United Kingdom spent £66.2 billion on research – an increase from £61.8 billion in 2020, according to the Campaign for Science and Engineering, a science-advocacy group in London. That makes Smith optimistic that the United Kingdom can expect a bounce back soon.