The India-China scientific cooperation is riding a new high, or so it seems, if one were to solely consider the number of papers that scientists in the two countries write in collaboration. A new study by Subbiah Arunachalam and B. Viswanathan published in Current Science quotes the Science Citation Index to show that papers co-authored by Indian and Chinese scientists have gone up from 124 in 2000 to 361 in 2007.

Among collaborations, multidisciplinary physics, physics of particles and fields, astronomy and astrophysics, nuclear physics and applied physics top the list.

According to the SCI figures, Indian scientists were publishing more than Chinese about 11 years back. China surpassed India in 1997 when Chinese scientists published 17,177 papers in SCI-indexed journals, as against 16,909 papers published by their Indian peers.

Last year, China had 2.76 times more papers than India. Considering that the neighbours are two of the most populous countries of the world, the competition is heartening. The Asian scientific community is truly buzzing!