China's corn research is in the forefront of the world.

Corn is one of the three staple grain crops in China. In the past 10 years, the weight of corn in the production of food crops in China has been increasing.

In 2006, the planting scale and output of domestic corn exceeded wheat for the first time, ranking second in cereal crops, accounting for nearly 30% of the total grain output. In 2009, the planting area of corn was 26.66 million hectares, surpassing rice for the first time. In 2012, corn production also surpassed rice and became the largest food crop variety.

Recently, a study by Li Chenying and his team from the Information Research Center of the Library of China Agricultural University shows that with the development of production, corn-related scientific research in China is also in the ascendant.

The research shows the ten-year changes of academic research in corn field in China from the aspects of the volume of articles, the index of comprehensive influence I3 and the number of high-level papers: Chinese researchers have made a leap in ten years; the research strength of China Agricultural University has performed exceptionally well in this leap.

Research on the Field of Maize in China

"Scientific research is the basis for promoting industrial development, and large corn producers are often high producers of corn research papers." "the purpose of this study is to examine the academic influence of China's scientific research institutions and the country as a whole in the field of corn research," Li Chenying said in an interview with China Science Daily. "

Li Chenying's research is based on Thomson Reuters WOS collection database and uses bibliometric method to make a statistical analysis of 20302 academic journal papers on corn research published since 2005.

The data show that China's corn research has become the leader in quantity and in the forefront in quality.

According to the statistics of the countries to which the correspondent authors belong, the number of articles published in the United States has basically remained at 450,500 in the past 10 years, while in 2005, the number of papers in China was 62, rising year after year to 507 in 2014.

In terms of order, the United States, which has a stable output of research articles, has been in the first place for a long time. China has been in the second place for six consecutive years since 2006, and began to "counterattack" in 2013, leading in the number of papers for two consecutive years.

It is worth mentioning that this study not only selected the number of papers, cited frequency, the number and proportion of high-level academic papers, international cooperation and other common scientific research evaluation indicators, but also selected the comprehensive influence index I3 for analysis.

"this is a new evaluation index of scientific research influence, which is more suitable for being limited to a specific research field." Introduced by Li Chenying. Using this index to evaluate the quality of research articles, the United States has always been in the first place; while the number of Chinese papers is growing rapidly, the influence gap is narrowing-if reflected in the chart, compared with the stable situation of other countries, the number of Chinese papers and comprehensive influence I3 show a trend of increasing.

"from the data of the overall and the top 10 countries in the annual comprehensive impact index from 2005 to May 2015, the competition between countries in the field of corn research in the future is mainly the competition between China and the United States," Li Chenying analyzed. "this competition is no longer a competition of quantity, but a competition of paper quality."

Remarkable achievements in Maize Research in China Agricultural University

On the basis of the comparison of academic influence at the national level, Li Chenying and his team also measured the academic influence at the institutional level.

It is found that the paper output of scientific research colleges and universities in China has increased rapidly in recent years. According to statistics, a total of 22 institutions were shortlisted in the top 10. Among them, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China Agricultural University ranked among them for nine consecutive years, while the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Sichuan Agricultural University were shortlisted for 5 and 2 times respectively.

Among them, the report card of China Agricultural University is even more outstanding: one is that since China Agricultural University entered the first echelon in the field of corn research in 2006, it has been in the top ten, with more than 70 articles since 2012, ranking first in the world for three consecutive years; the second is that the comprehensive influence index I3 of China Agricultural University in this field is second only to the Agricultural Research Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture. The Agricultural Research Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture and Iowa State University have been in the top 10 for 10 years in a row; China Agricultural University has been on the list nine times, and I3 jumped to second place in 2008, and began to surpass the Agricultural Research Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture in 2012, but the overall level of the decade is still below.

However, if we examine the difference between high-level papers and published papers and comprehensive influence index I3 at the same time, China Agricultural University still needs to be further improved compared with the Agricultural Research Bureau of the United States Department of Agriculture and other institutions. University of Minnesota, University of Hornheim, International Maize and Wheat improvement Center and other institutions have relatively more significant performance in high-level papers.

"China's scientific research institutions have made rapid progress in the number of papers published, but there is still room for further improvement in terms of high-level papers, and the gap between China and the United States is more obvious in this respect." Li Chenying wrote in the research report that she believes that this suggests that Chinese researchers should strengthen high-level cooperation with top institutions in the United States, Canada, Germany, France and other countries.

Behind the data of the thesis: the Power of seed

So what is the secret of China Agricultural University's remarkable achievements in the field of corn research in recent years?

Further reading the statistical data, according to the institutions in the university, the National Maize improvement Center is an important research center of maize genetics and breeding at China Agricultural University, and the researchers of the center have brought more than 1/3 contribution to the above-mentioned "transcript."

Since the 1950s, the research team, led by Professor Li Jingxiong, a scientist of the older generation in China, has made great efforts to promote the research on the utilization of maize heterosis in China, thus promoting the breeding and popularization of maize hybrids all over the country. it has made a great contribution to the increase of maize production and income in China. After that, the innovative research team, represented by professors Dai Jingrui, Xu Qifeng and Song Tongming, successively carried out work in the direction of resource innovation such as high-yield breeding and high-oil corn-- in 1998, the Ministry of Agriculture relied on China Agricultural University to establish the National Maize improvement Center. this generation of scientists is the founder of the center.

After the establishment of the Maize Center, the team led by Academician Dai Jingrui carried out the research and application of molecular breeding technology while carrying out population improvement, inbred lines and hybrid breeding. Aiming at molecular marker-assisted breeding, they successively explored molecular marker techniques such as RAPD, RFLP and SSR for cluster analysis and heterosis group classification of breeding materials, and carried out the construction of genome-wide linkage map and molecular marker mapping of important agronomic traits. At the same time, the differential expression of genes, the genetic basis of yield traits QTL and heterosis and the prediction of heterosis in maize were studied step by step.

If the accumulation and release of the achievements of innovative research is the basic reason for the high output of the central paper, then the research on high yield in recent years is also the inevitable result of the prosperity of talents in the corn center.

On the second floor of the National Maize improvement Center, there is a "pedigree map" of the corn breeding research team, with young and middle-aged as the main body. These researchers are also the authors of high-level papers on maize breeding: since 2005, four of the papers published by China Agricultural University in C-N-S and NG journals mainly related to corn are from these young and middle-aged researchers. In the group of authors of "highly cited papers" searched in WOS and corresponded by researchers of China Agricultural University, the team of Corn Center is also one of the more common groups.

Multidisciplinary research around the industrial chain

The research of Li Chenying and his team also found that the advantages of scientific research institutions in the field of corn research are also formed by a number of departments with different disciplines within their institutions. Specific to China Agricultural University, the formation of its overall advantages, the contribution of resources and environmental disciplines can not be ignored. From the statistical results of the study, we can see that in the past ten years, corn is the basic and one of the most important objects in the research of "theory and technology system of integrated nutrient resources management" in the discipline of resources and environment.

The discipline of Resources and Environment of China Agricultural University is the birthplace of soil science and plant nutrition in modern China. Around 1992, they put forward the concept and research field of plant nutrition science, basically established the theoretical system of plant nutrition research in China in 10 years, and developed a large number of applied technologies.

In 2004, researchers from the Resource and Environment discipline of China Agricultural University jointly completed the article "partial Progress and Enlightenment of Plant Nutrition Research in China in the past decade". One of the important analysis is that "the development of comprehensive management theory and technical system of nutrient resources with Chinese characteristics is one of the important research directions of plant nutrition in China in the future." This article may also be an entrance to the study of the subject-this not-very-long article is signed by more than a dozen authors. Coincidentally, the search found that these researchers are also the basic correspondent groups of "highly cited papers" of China Agricultural University in this academic field.

It can be said that the "encounter" of resources and environment disciplines and crop genetics and breeding disciplines in the field of maize research is the epitome of the traditional disciplines of China Agricultural University starting from different research origins, centering on the major needs of national agricultural science and technology and international academic frontiers.

"the biggest inspiration I get from the research is that the promotion of the international influence and voice of research in the field of corn does not rely solely on a certain discipline." but it depends on that all disciplines related to corn have to carry out research at the same time, "Li Chenying said." only when researchers in the entire industrial chain work together to tackle key problems in all directions, can our research strength be really improved. "