This question is a metric for an issue campaign on the future of the DoD-Silicon Valley relationship. To learn more about this issue campaign and the relevance of this question, see the campaign's subpage and a related blog post. To learn more about our new rolling risk question formats, see this demo video or blog post.

Context. Citations are a commonly used, though imperfect, measure of a paper's quality. Analyses of U.S. and China publication trends in AI have shown that while there are now more China-authored AI papers than U.S.-authored AI papers, fewer of the China-authored AI papers are highly cited. The gap is closing, however. The above-cited study from the Allen Institute estimates that China will have more top 1% (by citation count) AI papers than the U.S. in 2025. This question is based on different data than the Allen Institute study, but shows similar trends.

Data and resolution details. This question is based on (de-duplicated) publications from Dimensions, Microsoft Academic Graph, and Web of Science. We classified publications as "AI" or not using a predictive model trained on arXiv publication data, where a publication is "AI" if it’s categorized on arXiv under any of artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, computation and language, multi-agent systems, or robotics. To read more about this method, see “Identifying the Development and Application of Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Text.” A paper is a "U.S. paper" if any of its authors is affiliated with a U.S.-based institution. A paper is a "China paper" if any of its authors is affiliated with a China-based institution. "Highly cited" papers are those that are in the top 1% of papers published that year by citation count. 

The historical and forecasted values are the number of highly cited China AI papers divided by the number of highly cited U.S. AI papers. 

***

The historical data underlying the graph is here.

* * *

To suggest a change or clarification to this question, please select Request Clarification from the green gear-shaped dropdown button to the right of the question.

Issued on 09/13/21 02:10pm
If a paper is a collaboration between a personal affiliated with a U.S. institution and a person affiliated with a Chinese institution, it counts as both a U.S.-authored paper and a China-authored paper.