China's scientific cooperation with other countries has dropped since pandemic, which was caused by declining partnerships with the United States.

Warn that political tensions between China and the United States, combined with pandemic, have influenced research cooperation between the two countries. However, it takes some time for evidence of this type of decline in research databases.

The latest evidence comes from an analysis that Springer's China's team is carried out. ( The news editorial team of Nature is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature.) The authors used incite, a tool from the publisher's analysis service Clarivate based in London to analyze internationally interpreted articles that were published between 2013 and 2023. Incites is based on papers indexed in the scientific citation database Web of Science.

You found that the total number of work that was co -fitted by researchers from China and her international colleagues in 2022 was declining for the first time since 2013 (see 'Research Center').

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The proportion of research with Chinese and international co-authors has been declining for a long time. At its climax in 2018, 26.6 %-around 110,000 articles-were written by China's output in the Incites database with international colleagues. By 2023 the proportion of articles in the country with international colleagues had dropped by 7.2 %, although the total number of China's articles was doubled in almost 759,000 in the same period.

The decline in the internationally co-fitted work is mainly due to the declining share of Chinese-published papers published together with US researchers, which has decreased by 6.4 % between its maximum in 2017 and 2023-the greatest decline in all countries that have been included in the analysis. The results were presented on April 25 at the Zhongguancun Forum in Beijing.

The decline in US China collaboration reflects results from A 2022 analysis carried out, which showed that the number of researchers with dual US and China-affiliations in research articles in Elsevier's Scopus database between 2019 and 2021 by more than 20 %.

Although the latest analysis shows that the proportion of US China articles has slowly dropped in the past six years, pandemic has intensified the downward trend, says Marina Zhang, an innovation researcher who focuses on China at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.