China published 71,000 co-authored papers under international cooperation in 2015, making China 3rd in the world.

The National Center for Science and Technology Evaluation (NCSTE) issued the report on July 3, offering a thorough analysis on China’s international scientific cooperation. The report said that in the past decade China has made remarkable achievements in terms of both the quality and quantity of international cooperative research.

Statistics show that China has strengthened policy-making and enhanced investment on international scientific cooperation, substantially improving the country’s cooperation development.

Research grants in China increased to 2.1% of the GDP in 2016, up from 1.42% in 2006. From 2011 to 2015, 65.2% of the country’s international cooperative research was financed by China.

Wang Junrui, director of the NCSTE, said that with improved openness and mobility, China has considerably expanded its international cooperation on scientific research.

The number of the co-authored papers with members of the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development published from 2011 to 2015 increased 1.2 times to 230,000, up from 100,000 between 2006 and 2010. In addition, the scale of scientific cooperation with BRICS countries from 2011 to 2016 was 2.7 times of that from the period of 2006 to 2011.

The papers are also very influential. In 2015, they were cited 1.5 times each, 50% higher than the world average.

Among the high-quality scientific cooperation with Singapore, Australia, and the US, Chinese researchers accounted for more than 40% of the corresponding authors. Meanwhile, China has contributed to more than half of the world’s total multi-author papers.