U.S. vs. China AI Research by Topic
This chart compares U.S. and China participation across the twelve largest current OpenAlex AI research topics. It uses publication-affiliation countries, so a collaborative paper may count for both countries; the shares describe indexed research participation rather than author nationality, citation impact, or research quality.
What does it show?
China leads the United States across most large applied AI topics, while the United States remains stronger in selected frontier areas.
Methodology
Filters OpenAlex works to type = article, primary_topic.subfield.id = 1702 (Artificial Intelligence), and publication years 2021–2025. The 12 topics are selected automatically by article count among current-period AI articles with at least one mapped country; the same set is used in both charts. The denominator for each topic is articles with at least one mapped country. Each country counts an article once when it appears in any authorship affiliation; a U.S.–China collaboration therefore appears in both shares, which need not sum to 100%. Country refers to publication affiliation, not author nationality. OpenAlex topic and affiliation mappings can be revised.