aData from Thomson Reuters's “Global Research Report: China,” November 2009.

This Chinese New Year is the Year of the Tiger—an appropriate icon for China's increasing strength in the research landscape. A Thomson Reuters study released last November showed the country's research output increasing from over 20,000 papers in 1998 to nearly 112,000 papers in 2008. The Faculty of 1000, an online database of research papers, noted a similar trend in December, with China's articles in PubMed increasing nearly tenfold between 1999 and 2008. However, enthusiasm about the trend might be dogged by reports suggesting that cash incentives to publish may be contributing to misconduct such as plagiarism in China (Nature 463, 142–143, 2010).