China vs OECD: Bibliometric indicators, by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Bibliometric indicators, by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over time
- China
- OECD
How they compare
OECD currently reports 118,504 Scientific publications against 63,005 Scientific publications in China, a difference of 55,499 Scientific publications.
That makes OECD's figure about 1.9 times China's.
Across all 10 years both countries report, OECD has been ahead every year.
China ranks 2nd and OECD ranks 1st of 48 countries.
OECD has averaged higher in every one of the 2 decades both report.
Head to head by decade
| Decade | China | OECD | Difference | Ahead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010s | 25,396 Scientific publications | 101,099 Scientific publications | 75,703 Scientific publications | OECD |
| 2020s | 49,899 Scientific publications | 116,231 Scientific publications | 66,331 Scientific publications | OECD |
Averages of every year both report within each decade.
Frequently asked questions
- Which has higher bibliometric indicators, by sustainable development goals (sdgs), China or OECD?
- OECD, at 118,504 Scientific publications against 63,005 Scientific publications in China as of 2024.
- What is the difference in bibliometric indicators, by sustainable development goals (sdgs) between China and OECD?
- 55,499 Scientific publications, with OECD ahead.
- How many years of comparable data are there for China and OECD?
- 10 years are reported by both, from 2015 to 2024.
- How do China and OECD rank globally for bibliometric indicators, by sustainable development goals (sdgs)?
- China ranks 2nd and OECD ranks 1st of 48 countries.
- Where does this data come from?
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, published as Bibliometric indicators, by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — Fractional counts of scientific publications. Statizoid refreshes it automatically from the source and publishes the full history for both places.
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About this data
This dataset presents trends in the total number of scientific publications relevant to societal goals, as proxied by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework, expressed in fractional counts, for the 2015–2024 period. Coverage includes OECD member and accession countries, key partners (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and South Africa), and other selected non-OECD economies. This is an experimental indicator, developed under the OECD’s Fundstat initiative to improve evidence on the directionality and societal relevance of research and development (R&D) activities, by linking scientific output to 17 SDGs or none. To produce this indicator, the OECD developed a probabilistic AI-assisted classification model that identifies the SDG relevance of scientific publications based on their titles and abstracts. The approach builds on insights from the OECD International Survey of Science (ISSA2021), in which researchers reported which SDG their research contributed to. Using these responses, a labelled dataset was created to fine-tune SciBERT, a large language model (LLM) pre-trained on scientific literature, enabling it to predict the probability of relevance of a given text to each of the 17 SDGs, or to none. The trained classifier is then applied to publication titles and abstracts from the Scopus Custom Data. Publication counts are fractionalised across countries and aggregated annually for comparability. For further information on the methodology, see: Aristodemou, L., et al. (2025), “Assessing the direction of R&D funding towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a new classifier and the OECD Fundstat infrastructure”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Working Papers. Source: OECD Bibliometric Indicators, calculations based on Elsevier's Scopus Custom Data, Elsevier, Version 1.2026. Please cite as: OECD (2026), OECD Bibliometric indicators, OECD Science, Technology and Innovation Statistics, http://oe.cd/scientometrics, accessed on xx/xx/xxxx.