Countries pushing the boundaries of knowledge: the USA’s dominance, China’s rise, and the EU’s stagnation

Knowing which countries contribute the most to pushing the boundaries of knowledge in science and technology has social and political importance. However, common citation metrics do not adequately measure this contribution. A more stringent metric is needed—one that accurately captures the influence of breakthrough papers that are very highly cited but very rare. The recently described Rk-index was specifically designed to address this issue by being equivalent to the number of highly cited papers in narrow top percentiles, such as 0.1% or 0.01%. I applied this index to 25 countries and the EU across 10 key research topics—five technological and five biomedical—during the 2014–2017 period, studying domestic and international collaborative papers independently. In technological topics, the Rk-indices of domestic papers show that overall, the USA, China, and the EU are leaders, with other countries lagging behind. The USA is notably ahead of China, while the EU is far behind China. The same approach to biomedical topics reveals the overwhelming dominance of the USA, with the EU ahead of China. The analysis of internationally collaborative papers further demonstrates the USA’s dominance. A further study of the USA, China, and the EU in the 2004–2007 and 2009–2012 periods confirms the sustained dominance of the USA, the significant progress made by China in certain topics, and the overall stagnation of the EU. These results differ from current country rankings based on less stringent indicators.