Despite High Spending, Japan Trails Global Leaders in Top-Cited Science Papers

Despite significant government investment in research and development, Japan continues to lag behind global leaders when it comes to the number of highly-cited scientific papers, according to a 2026 report from Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy. In the field of natural sciences, Japan ranked thirteenth for its share of papers in the top 10% most frequently cited globally between 2022 and 2024, with 3,163 papers.

This places Japan behind global heavyweights China, the United States, and Britain. For the top 1% most frequently cited papers, Japan's ranking was twelfth, with an annual average of 271 papers. Overall, Japan published 66,214 research papers annually, placing it fifth worldwide.

The breakdown of top-cited papers by academic field revealed that Japan has a greater share of papers in physics and clinical medicine compared to other areas. The United States has a larger share of papers in clinical medicine, basic life sciences, and physics, while China excels in materials science, chemistry, and engineering. Japan's global ranking for top-cited papers has declined since the early 2000s, falling out of the top 10 in 2019 and never returning to that position.

Japan's R&D expenditures and number of researchers place it third globally, trailing only the United States and China. Japan spent ¥22.1 trillion on R&D and had 703,000 researchers. However, despite rising R&D spending in government, corporate, and university sectors since the early 2020s, this growth has not resulted in a higher global ranking for Japan's most-cited research papers.

Japan also has the highest number of "patent families" in the world, with 64,000 groups of patents for a single invention. Japan had 190,000 female researchers in 2025, comprising 19.0% of the total research workforce, with 39,000 holding doctorates.