Research in Greater Bay Area doubles over five years – Report

The research output of the so-called Greater Bay Area (GBA), which combines Hong Kong and Macau with nine other cities in China’s southern Guangdong province as an interconnected innovation hub, has almost doubled in the past five years and now contributes 13% of China’s total research output.

The figures are contained in a report just released by the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) commissioned from research data organisation Elsevier.

The increase in research output is supported by the growth in the number of active researchers in both Southern China and Hong Kong which doubled over the five-year period from 2018, totalling 421,000 by the end of 2022. Around 66,900 researchers were affiliated to Hong Kong institutions, making up around one in six of the region’s total active research paper authors.

According to the report – one of the first to assess the overall impact of the GBA project on research output – Hong Kong is a research powerhouse that drives the southern Chinese region’s research and innovation performance.

Despite Hong Kong’s population which makes up just 8.5% of the combined 80 million population of the GBA, the city accounts for 28% of the overall research output based on the number of papers in academic journals.

According to Elsevier’s bibliometric analysis of research papers in its Scopus database, the compound annual growth in research output from the region for the five-year period 2018-2022 was almost 18%, jumping from just under 74,000 research publications in 2018, to 143,000 in 2022 – almost doubling over five years.

Growth outpaces rest of China, world

That growth was faster than China’s own total research output growth excluding Hong Kong and the former Portuguese colony of Macau. It was also faster than growth in world research output, the report, Driving Innovation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, noted.

Hong Kong also accounts for 40% of research in the GBA that is considered ‘excellent’, defined as research published in the world’s top 1% of high impact journals.

Notably 7.5% of Hong Kong’s research output was published in such journals – 44% higher than the rest of the GBA. Without Hong Kong, citations, high impact publications, and impact factors all dropped during the five-year period 2018-2022 – another indication of the importance of Hong Kong to the region’s research prowess.

The report indicated that researchers in Hong Kong were more productive than their GBA peers, producing twice as many publications per active author as those in the rest of the region.

Hong Kong’s universities were collectively described as the main “pulling force” in international and industry collaborations in the GBA, said Lynn Li, managing director of Elsevier Greater China.

The report found that 30.2% of the GBA’s research collaborations are with international partners (based on collaborative publications), while cross-border collaborations were 41.1% for Hong Kong research overall and 43% for CUHK itself – higher than the rest of Hong Kong and significantly higher than the GBA.

Role of Hong Kong in driving research

Unlike other reports on research performance which separate China and Hong Kong as distinct research regions, the CUHK report not only combines Hong Kong with a specific region of China, but it also looks more closely at how Hong Kong, which has some of the top universities for research in Asia, drives research in the southern Chinese province that includes the tech hub of Shenzhen as well as cities such as Guangzhou with its major research universities.

The Greater Bay Area is heavily promoted by the Chinese government as aspiring to become a ‘world class’ science and technology cluster to rival top global clusters such as New York and California’s Silicon Valley in the United States, and Tokyo-Yokohama in Japan.

The GBA project also allows China to include Hong Kong in funding for regional research projects based on China’s own priorities, and to leverage Hong Kong’s research talent.

Hong Kong is the only city in the GBA with five top-100 universities in the QS rankings – a factor considered important for driving regional innovation.

From the GBA’s inception with an innovation plan released by Beijing in 2019, the intention was to use Hong Kong and its global research links as the engine to drive up research and innovation in the export-oriented manufacturing region of Southern China.

Experts noted the report showed that this goal is succeeding.

Since the inception of the GBA in 2019, the core cities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou were ranked as the second largest global science and technology cluster after Tokyo-Yokohama, according to the 2023 Global Innovation Index released by the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organisation.

CUHK’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Sham Mai-har said during the report’s launch at a special forum at CUHK’s Shenzhen Research Institute on 20 May that the findings showed the region’s research output was starting to reflect the combined research power of the area.

“This report demonstrates the GBA’s phenomenal growth as a research and development powerhouse. World Bank data says the GBA’s gross domestic product output would make it the world’s 11th largest economy, and this report shows us that the region’s research outputs are starting to reflect the size and scale of such a dynamic area,” she said.

High impact research

The research output from the region also generated relatively high scholarly impact – 50% more cited than the world average, according to the report.

Areas of strength include engineering, medicine and computer science with the most publications, though Hong Kong also had specific research strength in social sciences.

Leading Guangdong institutions in terms of the number of publications include Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and South China University of Technology (SusTech) in Shenzhen a distant second. But Hong Kong universities, while registering fewer publications over the five-year period, had higher citation and impact factors.

During the reporting period, COVID-19 related research papers boosted the impact factor of some GBA universities with medical schools (such as SusTech and Sun Yat-Sen University) and may have distorted the picture.

Collaboration

Around 4.8% of GBA research is in collaboration with industrial partners – around double the global average.

Corporate publications contribute to 3.7% of GBA research output, though three-quarters of these were co-authored with academic or Chinese government institutions. Some of the corporations include Shenzhen-based IT companies Huawei and Tencent, and Hong Kong software company SenseTime.

Government organisations include China Southern Power Grid, China Nuclear Power Engineering and China General Nuclear Power group, with a heavy concentration in the power and energy sector.

CUHK itself has a strong research performance within the GBA. Nearly 40% of CUHK’s publications involve collaboration with other GBA institutions, highlighting the university’s role in strengthening research connections with China and beyond, according to the report.

Of these collaborations, 60% were co-authored with GBA institutions and those beyond the region, which the report said indicated CUHK’s commitment to “bridging the region with its partners further afield”.