A technician in China works on an intelligent production line for solar photovoltaic modules.Credit: CFOTO/Sipa USA via Alamy
The clear divergence in approaches to public research funding in the East and West is laid bare in the first Nature Index ranking for applied sciences.
China dominates the ranking and other Asian countries, such as South Korea and Singapore, boast an outsized performance in the field for the scale of their overall research output. It’s a different story for many Western countries, however, which have a relatively small Nature Index output in the applied sciences.
The ranking is based on research articles published last year in 25 applied-sciences journals and conferences that, in a survey, were named by almost 4,200 researchers as venues where they would want to publish their ‘most significant’ work (see ‘Selecting applied-sciences journals and conferences for the Nature Index’). The venues, which include some new to the Nature Index and others already in the natural-science section of the database, span fields such as engineering, computer science and food science. Applied-sciences articles in multidisciplinary journals that are already part of the Nature Index — such as Nature and Science — also counted towards the results.
Researchers based in China contributed to 56% of the applied-sciences output included for the ranking, with a Share of 22,261 (the Nature Index metric Share is a fractional count of authorships of research articles). The United States is a distant second, with a Share of 4,099, which represents 10% of the applied-sciences research in 2024 (see ‘Applied measures’). The leading ten research institutions in applied sciences are also all based in China (see ‘Clean Sweep’).
South Korea, which was seventh in the Nature Index 2025 Research Leaders ranking — on the basis of articles published in 2024 in the 145 natural and health-sciences journals that make up the database — comes fourth in the applied-sciences ranking, with a Share of 1,342, representing 3.4% of global output in 2024. This is only marginally behind Germany, in third, which has a Share of 1,488. The United Kingdom, in fifth place, has a Share of 1,024, or 2.6% of global output, just ahead of Japan in sixth and India in seventh. France — a major force in the current configuration of the Nature Index, with an overall placing in this year’s Research Leaders of sixth — is twelfth for applied sciences.
This apparent East–West split for applied sciences is also evident when using the data to answer a slightly different question: what proportion of a country’s research output in the Nature Index is in applied sciences once the new journals are added?
For Malaysia, it is almost 90%, helping it to reach 31st place in the table (it did not make the Research Leaders top 50). For China, that figure stands at 52%; for South Korea it is 53% and for Singapore it is 49%. Compare that with Germany: only 27% of its Nature Index research is in the applied sciences. For the United Kingdom, the proportion is 23%, and for France and the United States it’s just under 18% (see ‘Applied measures’).
The performance of Asian countries in the applied sciences should come as no surprise, says Christos Petrou, chief analyst at the academic consultancy firm Scholarly Intelligence, based in Tokyo. “This is not an overnight success story,” he says. Instead, it follows a deliberate and concerted effort by governments to encourage and foster science that they have identified as likely to yield practical innovations in the near term, says Petrou. “They have been at it for several years.”
Fundamental versus applied
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