Tectonic shifts in global science: US-China scientific competition and the Muslim-majority science systems in multipolarising science

Global science is set to experience different times in the 2020s, as it increasingly becomes multipolar. China surpassed the US in terms of the number of scientific papers in 2020 in most scientific databases. This scenario is expected to have implications not only in East Asia but also beyond the region. Against this backdrop, this paper investigated the scientific influence of the US-China competition on six major Muslim-majority science systems. Multiple data sources were used to collect data for the bibliometric analyses, which included the trend analysis of collaboration patterns, discipline-based collaborations, authorship patterns for responsibility in collaborations and citation premium of collaborations with the US versus China. All the analyses consistently demonstrated that the US is losing out its scientific influence on the selected Muslim-majority science systems to China. Analysis results indicated that an astonishing increase in collaborations with China-based scientists occurred in the last decade. Half of the selected Muslim-majority science systems collaborated more with China-based scientists, whereas the other half collaborated more with the US in 2021, indicating a fifty-fifty split. The collaborations with China-based authors garnered higher citation premiums for the selected Muslim-majority science systems than the collaborations with the US.