Simon Marginson Sees Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Korea Are on the Economic Move. (April 12, 2013)

Simon Marginson is professor at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne. In his op-ed for The Australian a couple of days ago he acknowledges that: "The world is no longer run by the US, Britain and Western Europe with a bit of help from Japan."

Nevertheless, to Professor Marginson it is only China  that "is a clear-cut emerging superstar.. Between 1995 and 2009 China's academic journal papers per year jumped from 9061 to 74,019, a factor of 8.17. And he cites that "in 2010 China's share of top papers in chemistry had jumped to 10.6 per cent, almost one-third the share of the US (34.6 per cent)."

Turning to Brazil it is its flagship University of Sao Paulo that gets a Guernsey as being "the world's eighth-largest producer of journal papers [while] elsewhere the system is fragmented"

As for India: "After a long period of stagnation, India's output of journal papers is climbing. Volume multiplied by 2.13 between 1995 and 2009."

But Russia gets a wooden spoon: "Russia's science paper output fell from 18,604 in 1995... to 14,016 in 2009, a factor of 0.75. Now there are only two Russian universities in the world top 500, compared to 33 in China."

And turning to Korea: "Seoul has become a world city and Korea's industry, technology, science and universities are emerging quickly, not to mention K-pop and Gangnam style."