A Novel Metric for Assessing National Strength in Scientific Research: Understanding China's Research Output in Quantum Technology through Collaboration
Article Category: Research Paper
Published Online: Oct 14, 2022
Page range: 39 - 60
Received: May 24, 2022
Accepted: Sep 19, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/jdis-2022-0019
Keywords
© 2022 Yuqi Wang et al., published by Sciendo
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Purpose
The 5th Plenary Session of the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee clearly states that developing science and technology through self-reliance and self-strengthening provides the strategic underpinning for China's development. Based on this background, this paper explores a metric model for assessing national scientific research strength through collaboration on research papers.
Design/methodology/approach
We propose a novel metric model for assessing national scientific research strength, which sets two indicators, national scientific self-reliance (
Findings
The results show that the research of quantum technology in China has always been relatively independent with fewer international collaboration papers and located in a more marginal position in cooperation networks. China's academic contribution (
Research limitations
This paper only reflects China's scientific research strength in quantum technology from collaboration on research papers and doesn’t consider the segmentation of quantum technology and the industrial upstream and downstream aspects, which need further study.
Practical implications
The model is helpful to better understand the national scientific research strength in a certain field from “self-reliance” and “self-strengthening”.
Originality/value
We propose a novel metric model to measure the national scientific research strength from the perspective of “self-reliance” and “self-strengthening”, which provides a solid basis for the assessment of the strength level of scientific research in countries/regions and institutions.