In 2004, the Chinese S&T professionals published 111,000 scientific papers on international publications (i.e. papers included by SCI, EI and ISTP), representing a year-on-year increase of 18,000 papers (19.3%), and a share of 6.3% among the total number of 1,761,000 papers for the whole world, which is 1.2 point higher than that of 5.1% in 2003. China has been constantly ranked, since 2002, the 5^th country in terms of the number of internationally published scientific papers, preceded by the U.S, Japan, U.K and Germany.

Coming to patents, in 2005, China received and processed 476,000 patent applications and licensed 214,000 patents, including 173,000 applications and 53,000 licenses for patents of invention. The “Tenth Five-year Plan” Period concluded in 1,595,000 patent applications and 832,000 patent licenses in total, respectively 2.48 and 2.3 times as many as those of the “Ninth Five-year Plan” Period. The “Tenth Five-year Plan” Period also harvested 552,000 applications and 176,000 licenses for patents of invention, respectively 3.0 and 5.6 times as many as those of the “Ninth Five-year Plan” Period.