On Dec. 5, 2025, an annual report published by the Institutes of Science and Development of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, along with global analytics company Clarivate, reported that China and the United States vied for the top spot across research fronts in 11 major scientific fields, with the US achieving only a marginal edge in overall performance. The study is based its data on highly cited research papers published between 2019 and 2024.

China ranked first in six major scientific fields, namely agricultural, plant and animal sciences; ecology and environmental sciences; chemistry and materials science; physics; information science; and economics, psychology and other social sciences.

In research areas where China is relatively weaker, such as clinical medicine and astronomy and astrophysics, it ranked fourth and fifth, respectively, but showed significant improvement compared with the past.

The US led in five major scientific fields, namely geosciences, clinical medicine, biological sciences, astronomy and astrophysics, and mathematics. It also ranked second in the remaining six fields, making its overall fundamental research activity strongest globally, but the gap with China has significantly narrowed.

“When considered alongside previous reports, the trend of the US and China advancing side by side is becoming increasingly prominent,” the report said, noting that the United Kingdom and Germany form the second tier of countries in terms of advancements made in major scientific studies. According to that report, the Chinese mainland continues to rank second in the number of highly cited scholars among around 7,000 scholars who were selected based on their highly cited papers over the past 11 years.