Skip to content
AquiaRobotics

Story 06 · 12 October 2026

Why do China and the US change places between these charts?

China has the larger share of the recent robotics papers in our collection. US owners have the larger share of robotics patents granted in the United States. The contrast looks dramatic. We examine how the choice of records, countries and counting rules shapes the result — and what remains unexplained.

Field of viewTwo collections read whole: the papers we gathered by following citations, with the countries of their authors’ institutions, and every US patent granted in five robotics classes, with the country of its first-named owner. Equal five-year windows to 2024; 2025 apart. Neither is a census of where robotics is invented.How much can this map see?

Measured

01 · The reversal

Which country leads, in papers and in US patents?

ChinaUnited States0%20%40%60%papers · fractional credit2000–042010–142020–242025US patents · first-named owner2000–042010–142020–242025
Left: of the credit for each paper, split equally among the countries of its authors’ institutions, the share going to China and to the United States, by five-year window. Right: of the US patents granted in five robotics classes whose first-named owner has a country, the share owned in China and in the United States. Same windows, same scale.Measured
Data table
Windowpapers · fractional credit · China, %papers · fractional credit · United States, %US patents · first-named owner · China, %US patents · first-named owner · United States, %
2000–043.933.90.154.3
2005–0912.724.20.149.1
2010–1417.018.91.853.3
2015–1920.517.63.158.5
2020–2431.013.95.952.2
202532.910.36.749.5

Draw robotics from papers and China rises: 3.9% of the credit in 2000–04, 31.0% in 2020–24, while the United States falls from 33.9% to 13.9%. Draw it from patents granted in the United States and the American owners still hold 52.2% in 2020–24; Chinese owners 5.9%, up from 0.1%. The two charts do not measure the same act. One follows authors through a collection we built by following citations; the other follows owners seeking rights in one national market. Before asking why they disagree, look at what one record of each counts.

02 · Two records

What does one paper count, and one patent?

One paper

A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning

Published 2020; cited 6,171 times, as OpenAlex counts.

The institutions its authors name, as the paper prints them, and the country each carries:

Baidu Inc., Beijing, China · China

Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China · China

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, USA · United States

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · China

Countries: China and United States — two, so 50% of the paper to each under the split rule, or one full count each under the pairs rule.

One patent

Testing method for automated driving system, electronic device and storage medium

US 12183128, granted 31 December 2024.

First-named owner: BEIJING BAIDU NETCOM SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD. — China, the country the count uses.

One owner on the patent; the inventors' addresses, which the count does not use, are in China.

In our count through vehicles and drones that steer themselves (G05D1).

One paper credits every country its authors’ institutions name — this one, two countries, so each gets 50% of it under the fractional rule, or a full count under the pairs rule. One patent credits one country: its first-named owner’s, which is not the inventors’ country, nor the first owner in its history.Measured

When a paper has authors in Beijing and in Boston, which country does it count for? Both, under the rule that counts paper–country pairs; half each, under the rule that splits the credit. We use the split; the pairs rule gives China 27.6% in 2020–24 instead of 31.0%, and the reversal survives either way. A patent carries an owner, and the register gives the owner a country. We take the first-named owner at grant, which is a legal address — not where the inventors worked, not who owned it first, and only for patents that name a country at all: 1,282 of the 38,234 grants in 2020–24 name none and are left out of the shares.

03 · What survives

Does the reversal hold under a stricter comparison?

0%20%40%60%papers · pairs rule27.6 · 13.7papers · fractional credit31.0 · 13.9US patents · five classes5.9 · 52.2● · ○● China, %○ United States, %
The 2020–24 window under every counting rule we hold: two rules for papers, and for patents our five classes, each matched on its own groups only (81,184 grants).Measured
Data table
RowChinaUnited States
papers · pairs rule27.6%13.7%
papers · fractional credit31.0%13.9%
US patents · five classes5.9%52.2%

In the patents, Chinese owners hold 5.9% of the 2020–24 grants and American owners 52.2%; under either paper rule China leads the papers. What it is remains open. Papers and US patents record two different acts, in two different places, with two different ways of naming a country; a Chinese team may protect its work at home, or not at all, or in a field these classes miss. Our worldwide patent families — 200,507 so far — are the collection that can test that, and they will get their own story when the earlier years are in. Until then: a reversal that survives its counting rules, and a cause the record does not yet hold.

Where to go next

The data, at the figure Next story: When a university patent becomes a company patent: what do the documents establish?

Sources

  1. Countries in the papers and in US patents, by equal five-year window, from the country windows published on 2026-09-24 — countries-windows.json: from paper_country_windows, the share of each window’s papers credited to China and to the United States under the pairs rule (a paper counts once for each country among its institutions) and under fractional credit (one paper split equally among its countries), with the papers that carry no country and enter no share; from robotics_patent_country_windows, the share of each window’s US robotics patents with an owner country owned in China and in the United States, over the five classes (the strict selection kept beside them holds the same grants since the vehicle class was confined to its own group), with the grants that name no country. Windows of five years from 2000 to 2024, and 2025 apart.
  2. One paper and one patent, quoted from the tables that hold them — countries-records.json: the most cited paper of 2020–2024 whose institutions carry two or more countries, one of them China, with its institutions as the paper prints them and the country each carries; and the most recent 2024 grant whose first-named owner is in China, with that owner and its country. Every value on the two panels is quoted from its row, never counted.
  3. The last full window under every counting rule — countries-survives.json: the rows of the last full window (2020 to 2024) of the windows file for China and the United States — papers under the pairs rule and under fractional credit, US patents over the five classes — drawn as one row per rule.
  4. The worldwide patent families we are collecting from the European Patent Office — patents.world.families, counted on the data page: the distinct families fetched so far from the office’s worldwide register for our classes and windows — a growing copy, newest filings first, not yet a whole register.

All stories