U.S. vs. China in Highly Cited AI Research
This chart compares U.S. and China participation in highly cited AI research articles. It uses OpenAlex’s field-, year-, and work-type-normalized top-decile citation flag and ends after a three-year citation lag; collaborative papers may count for both countries, and affiliation country is not author nationality.
What does it show?
China has overtaken the United States in its share of highly cited indexed AI research.
Methodology
For each publication year from 2000 through the latest year with a three-year citation lag, filters OpenAlex works to type = article, primary_topic.subfield.id = 1702 (Artificial Intelligence), and citation_normalized_percentile.is_in_top_10_percent = true. OpenAlex normalizes this citation flag within work type, publication year, and subfield. The denominator is top-10%-cited AI articles with at least one mapped country. Each U.S. or China series counts an article once when that country appears in any authorship affiliation. A collaborative U.S.-China paper therefore appears in both series, so the shares are presence-based and need not sum to 100%. Affiliation country is not author nationality, citation is not a complete measure of research quality, and OpenAlex records and normalization can be revised.