Who Stands on the Shoulders of Chinese (Scientific) Giants? Evidence from Chemistry

In recent decades, Chinese researchers have become preeminent contributors to the scientiﬁc enterprise, as reﬂected by the citation impact of publications originating from Chinese research institutions. But are there frictions speciﬁc to the diﬀusion of scientiﬁc knowledge originating from China? Focusing on elite chemistry researchers, we assemble a sample of articles by Chinese and non-Chinese PIs, carefully matched on “quality.” We ﬁnd that relative to non-Chinese, non-US PIs, Chinese PIs’ articles receive 32% fewer citations from US researchers on average. This discount vanishes for the articles of scientists who received the entirety of their training in the US, and is twice as large in subﬁelds aﬄicted by a large number of retraction scandals. Our results imply that US researchers do not build as readily on the work of Chinese researchers, relative to the work of other foreign scientists, even in a setting where Chinese scientists have long excelled.