A recent report shows China leading in six of 11 major scientific fields, with the US ahead in five and only a marginal overall edge. China has made significant improvements in weaker areas, narrowing the gap.
The 2025 Research Frontiers and 2025 Research Frontiers Heat Index reports, jointly released by the Institutes of Science and Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the National Science Library of CAS, and global analytics firm Clarivate, are based on highly cited research papers from 2019 to 2024.
China ranked first in six major scientific fields: agricultural, plant and animal sciences; ecology and environmental sciences; chemistry and materials science; physics; information science; and economics, psychology and other social sciences. In relatively weaker areas like clinical medicine and astronomy and astrophysics, China placed fourth and fifth respectively, showing significant improvement over the past.
The US led in five fields: geosciences, clinical medicine, biological sciences, astronomy and astrophysics, and mathematics. It ranked second in the remaining six, maintaining the strongest overall fundamental research globally, though the gap with China has narrowed considerably. The report notes the trend of the US and China advancing side by side, with the UK and Germany in the second tier.
Pan Jiaofeng, president of the Institutes of Science and Development, said the report raises new questions for the integrated development of science, technology, economy, and other fields. He highlighted cutting-edge topics like high-throughput single-cell technologies, dark matter detection, and deep AI integration in research and engineering.
Emmanuel Thiveaud, vice-president of Clarivate, praised China's progress: "Over the past decades, we have witnessed the tremendous progress China has made and continues to make in research and development. It's not surprising that China is already at the forefront of many research fronts." Another Clarivate report ranks mainland China second among around 7,000 highly cited scholars based on papers over the past 11 years.
Yang Fan, deputy director of the Institutes, noted that across the 11 fields, the report identified 110 active and 18 emerging research fronts, with more than half of the emerging ones related to AI, particularly in clinical medicine and life sciences. Tsinghua University tenured professor Li Shao said four of seven emerging fronts in clinical medicine involve large language models in healthcare, underscoring AI's role in targeted treatments for lifestyle diseases and traditional Chinese medicine.