China leads scientific trends; the West launches new ones

TL;DR

This paper introduces two new forward-looking, model-based metrics to assess national scientific leadership by analyzing emerging research areas and surprising new directions, revealing China's early leadership in emerging fields and contrasting strategies of the US and Europe.

Contribution

The paper develops and validates innovative measures that predict scientific leadership trajectories, moving beyond traditional backward-looking metrics.

Findings

China led in emerging research areas a decade ago.

The US and Europe maintain leadership through prescient and interdisciplinary work.

Patterns are consistent across multiple scientific domains and databases.

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.