China Leads in Highly Cited AI Papers

China AI Development Report 2018 (p. 20f.): Using the Web of Science database, this report puts China in the lead ahead of the US and any European country, both for the decade between 2007 and 2017 and in terms of annual output in 2017. Aggregating all European countries out of the top 10 from 2007 to 2017 (the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain), they almost catch up to the US and China, reaching 2,096 highly cited papers, compared to 2,241 and 2,349, respectively. The same applies to “hot papers.” Unfortunately, I do not know how they operationalized either “highly cited” or “hot.” Eyeballing combined European output in 2017 alone; China is still in the lead with an increasingly large margin, ahead of the US and Europe, which seem to be roughly tied.

Source: Stefan Torges