U.S. vs. China Share of AI Research Papers
This chart compares U.S. and China participation in OpenAlex AI research articles through the latest complete publication year. Country is assigned from publication affiliations and collaborative papers may count for both countries; the shares measure indexed output, not citation impact, research quality, or author nationality.
What does it show?
China now appears on roughly twice the share of indexed AI papers as the United States.
Methodology
For each complete publication year from 1990, filters OpenAlex works to type = article and primary_topic.subfield.id = 1702 (Artificial Intelligence). The denominator is AI articles with at least one mapped country. Each series counts an article once when the United States or China 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%. This chart measures indexed publication participation, not citation impact, research quality, author nationality, or investment. OpenAlex affiliations, countries, topic assignments, and historical records can be revised.