China seems to have surpassed the US in scientific production, standing out in fields such as mathematics, advanced materials or engineering. Almost a third of the articles with the greatest impact (top 1%, those most likely to generate Nobel prizes) are already produced in China, moving it away from its traditional image of poor quality. Many will argue that these data are nuanced. But the truth is that China, an irrelevant scientific actor in 2010, has staged an unprecedented disruption on the global technological scene, a true attack from below, from clearly inferior positions, in just over ten years.
Anglo-Saxon universities are frontier research bastions: according to the influential Shanghai ranking, eight American and two British universities are among the top-10. But there is none from the EU. Miquel Molina echoed in this newspaper: the irrelevance of European research is alarming in a context of the struggle for global leadership between China and the US. It is true that these rankings are controversial and that they basically measure high-impact scientific publications academic. By focusing on them, universities can leave teaching excellence or the transfer of results to society and the economy in the background. But they are a good indicator of the strategic priorities and management models of the different countries.
