Why China is currently underperforming in medical innovation and what China can do about it?—Part II

Our AME survey-002 results indicated that, compared with Euro-American countries, China is underperforming in medical innovation (1-3, Supplementary 1). To further explore this point, a metric literature analysis was carried out. The method was similar to the recent Zhang et al.’s paper (4). Ten reputable medical journals were included as the indicator for analysis, i.e., (I) Circulation Research; (II) Blood; (III) Leukemia; (IV) Stem Cells; (V) Haematologica; (VI) Thrombosis and Haemostasis; (VII) Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis; (VIII) Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology; (IX) Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism; and (X) British Journal of Haematology. All papers, including reviews and case reports, published during the periods of 1990-2014 by four countries, China (Mainland), Japan, Germany, and Switzerland, were retrieved, and where the corresponding author was affiliated with the above geographic regions were considered to be research output by the respective regions. As compared with English-speaking countries, all these four countries do not have a large proportion of guest researchers. The annual research and development (R&D) expenditure of each region was also retrieved (5); and the results are shown in Figure 1.