Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2603.01117

China leads scientific trends; the West launches new ones

Jeffrey W. Lockhart·Jamshid Sourati·Feng Shi·James Evans
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

How nations shape the scientific frontier matters for technological competition, but standard metrics, including publication counts, citations, and disruption indices, look backward and fail to distinguish between fundamentally different leadership strategies. We develop and validate two forward-looking model-based measures and apply them to tens of millions of articles since 1990. The first embeds research pathways within an evolving hypergraph of concepts and scientists to identify leadership in emerging areas--work that anticipates where the scientific crowd is heading. The second embeds evolving samples of ideas and disciplines drawn upon in past research to identify leadership in surprising new directions as unexpected combinations become routine and science reorganizes around them. China became the global leader in emerging areas roughly a decade ago, well before it led in volume, reflecting a capacity to detect and amplify nascent consensus at scale. The United States and Europe show the opposite profile: declining emergence shares but persistent leadership in prescient work, especially research bridging disciplinary boundaries. These patterns replicate across databases, attribution methods, and strategic domains, including AI, biotechnology, energy, and semiconductors. Nations lead science by reading the landscape or by reshaping it, and the institutional requirements for each strategy lie in tension. The distribution of these strategies promises to shape the global structure of technological leadership for decades.

Explore related subjects

cs.DLcs.SIecon.GNq-fin.ECstat.AP

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Jamshid Sourati, Feng Shi, James Evans. 2026-03-01. China leads scientific trends; the West launches new ones. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.01117

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

From Funding to Findings (FIND): An Open Database of NSF Awards and Research Outputs

Public funding plays a central role in driving scientific discovery. To better understand the link between research inputs and outputs, we introduce FIND (Funding-Impact NSF Database), an open-access dataset that systematically links NSF grant proposals to their downstream research outputs, including publication metadata and abstracts. The primary contribution of this project is the creation of a large-scale, structured dataset that enables transparency, impact evaluation, and metascience research on the returns to public funding. To illustrate the potential of FIND, we present two proof-of-concept NLP applications. First, we analyze whether the language of grant proposals can predict the subsequent citation impact of funded research. Second, we leverage large language models to extract scientific claims from both proposals and resulting publications, allowing us to measure the extent to which funded projects deliver on their stated goals. Together, these applications highlight the utility of FIND for advancing metascience, informing funding policy, and enabling novel AI-driven analyses of the scientific process.

cs.DL↗
arXiv2026

Geometric Signatures of Conceptual Reorganization: A Counterfactual Embedding Framework for Detecting Scientific Revolutions

We introduce document embedding geometry as a quantitative observable of conceptual reorganization and develop a counterfactual ablation framework for measuring how individual concepts influence the organization of scientific knowledge, providing a quantitative framework for detecting scientific revolutions. The observable is defined by the geometric perturbation induced when removing documents associated with a candidate concept from the embedding space before and after its historical emergence. Statistical validation is performed using five historical case studies spanning physics, mathematics, and machine learning: special relativity, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the Higgs mechanism, deep learning, and the attention mechanism underlying transformer architectures. Across the historical case studies, the framework identifies measurable geometric signatures associated with conceptual reorganization, while the validation studies expose important limitations arising from document assignment and sparse historical data. These results establish embedding geometry as a medium for quantifying conceptual reorganization, providing a new approach for studying how scientific fields restructure over time.

cs.DL↗
arXiv2026

Toward non-textual representation of social anthropology: Modeling cultures as knowledge graphs

The study examines the emerging field of knowledge representation in the context of the semantic web and linked data, with a focus on knowledge produced within the social sciences - particularly in sociocultural anthropology. It starts from the premise that natural language, especially its textualized form, has long been the primary vehicle for producing and communicating anthropological research. Informed by theoretical approaches from information science, the study explores how computational methods may offer alternative modes of structuring and representing anthropological knowledge. It challenges the dominance of text as the sole representational medium and highlights the potential of semantic modeling to open new epistemological pathways. At the same time, it acknowledges the conceptual and methodological challenges involved in such a transition. This approach shifts emphasis away from metrics and programming, foregrounding processes of conceptualization, semantics, meaning, and reasoning as key to engaging with anthropological knowledge in digital environments.

cs.DL↗