Los Angeles, CA - April 28, 2026 - New 2025 country rankings released by ScholarGPS® reveal a significant shift in global scientific power, with several emerging nations gaining ground on long-established research leaders. While the United States continues to lead overall and in Medicine, Life Sciences, and Biology, China has taken the top position globally in Engineering, Agriculture, Computer Science, and Biotechnology—marking a significant expansion of its influence in technological research.
Comparing lifetime rankings with the most recent five-year period (2020–2024) reveals strong upward momentum among several countries:
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Iran is among the fastest-rising research nations, advancing across multiple fields, including Engineering (#20 → #10), Agriculture (#25 → #4), Public Health (#27 → #6), and Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (#16 → #6).
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India has rapidly expanded its global research footprint, climbing from #16 to #5 in overall rankings—one of the largest leaps of any nation in the study period. China has seen a parallel rise, advancing from #5 to #2 overall, with field-level gains concentrated in Engineering, Computer Science, and Biotechnology.
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Italy, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia are also gaining noticeable ground, with improvements in both research output and global citation impact across multiple disciplines.
In contrast, several traditionally strong research nations—including Canada, France, Japan, Switzerland, and Sweden—have lost relative ground in recent five-year rankings, indicating slower growth compared to faster-growing research nations.
"Global scientific leadership is no longer concentrated among a few nations," said ScholarGPS Founder and CEO Amir Faghri. "We are seeing a measurable shift toward a more distributed and competitive research landscape, where emerging countries are rapidly gaining strength not only in volume of output, but in impact and quality."
ScholarGPS rankings are based on large-scale analysis of global research productivity, impact, and quality using advanced AI-driven methods. The rankings draw exclusively from peer-reviewed, archival publications, exclude self-citations, and apply a consistent, quantitative framework across scholars, institutions, and countries. The methodology and underlying data have been independently published in peer-reviewed journals, including Quantitative Science Studies and the Journal of Data and Information Science.
Data visualizations and plots are available at:
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Country rankings: https://scholargps.com/country-ranking-chart
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Institutional rankings: https://scholargps.com/institutional-ranking-chart
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Highly ranked scholars: https://scholargps.com/highly-ranked-scholar-chart
Explore the full platform and rankings at: https://scholargps.com
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About ScholarGPS®
ScholarGPS® is an independent, non-publisher-affiliated research analytics platform. It provides AI-powered, quantitative rankings of scholars, institutions, and academic programs worldwide. Its continuously updated database includes over 270 million scholarly archival publications and patents, 30 million scholar profiles, and 5,500 institutional profiles across 14 broad fields, 177 disciplines, and more than 350,000 specialties—designed by scholars, for scholars.
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