Still Number One

When it comes to publishing research on biology and medicine, the US is still "the dominant player," says Forbes' Matthew Herper. The US published more than 1.14 million scientific articles in those fields between 2005 and 2009, and published 29 percent of papers published worldwide in 2009 alone, Herper says. In data provided for Forbes by SciVal analytics, it isclear that the US outstrips the rest of the top 10 in publication output, though China is rapidly increasing its rate of publication. Papers from US researchers are also more likely to be cited in the literature than those in any other country except the Netherlands or Switzerland, Herper says. "Size is obviously part of the reason the US has published so many bioscience papers. Pharmaceutical companies have been flocking to the San Francisco Bay area and Cambridge, Mass., because that's where Stanford and MIT and Harvard already are," he adds. China is becoming more attractive to companies, however. BGI is now the biggest DNA sequencing operation in the world, and is executing large projects on its own, like an effort to sequence 1,000 different species, Herper says. But most importantly, he adds, is that the US is among the most collaborative nations, which may be the key to keeping the quality of published work high and staying ahead of China.