China issues reports on research fronts in 2020

China has released reports on research hotspots and emerging frontier in 2020.

Titled "Research Fronts 2020" and "Research Fronts 2020: Active Fields, Leading Countries", the two reports were issued on Nov 13 by the Institutes of Science and Development under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASISD), National Science Library and Clarivate Analytics.

In the reports, 110 hot and 38 emerging research fronts are identified out of 11 broad research areas.

The reports evaluate the performance of leading countries in those research areas, revealing that China ranks second to the United States, followed by Britain, Germany and France.

The reports also reveal that China's most active research topics are in the fields of agricultural science, plant and animal sciences, chemistry and materials science, mathematics and information science. The fields of ecology and environmental science, physics, economics and psychology are relatively active.

The reports show that the research and development in cutting-edge key areas such as artificial intelligence, clean energy, two-dimensional materials and gene editing are highly active, demonstrating the recent trend of the new round of scientific and technological revolution.