Growth of Science: How long will the United States uphold its position?

TL;DR

This study analyzes the growth and disparities in scientific publications among top countries from 1996 to 2020, predicting future shifts in global scientific leadership and the potential decline of the US position.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of scientific growth using Taylor's law, entropy measures, and regression models to forecast future global scientific rankings.

Findings

US may lose its top position around 2046

Disparity among countries is decreasing over time

India, Indonesia, and Iran may surpass the US in scientific output

Abstract

Policymakers often assess the growth of science in a country and compare it with that of other countries to set future planning for scientific research focusing on the sustainable development and economic growth of the country. Here, we study the growth of science for the period of 1996-2020 corresponding to the top fifty countries with the highest publications in 2020. It is found that the annual growth rates of scientific and technical journal publications exhibit Taylor's power law behavior indicating the dependence of the variance on the mean growth rate and the distributions of annual growth rates follow skew-symmetric distributions. Furthermore, we have computed the entropy based on annual publication numbers among the countries to assess the spatial disparity in the system. The entropy is found to increase mostly linear with time reducing the disparity among the countries. By performing the linear regression analysis, we predict that around the year 2046, all the countries excluding China may equally contribute towards the growth of science. We have also assessed the stability of the current USA ranking by computing the entropy between the USA and other countries. Based on the regression analysis, it is estimated that three potential countries such as Indonesia, India, and Iran may take the ranks ahead of the USA around the years 2024, 2029, and 2041 respectively.