A global competitor in scientific research, Canada was ranked seventh for high-quality natural-sciences research in the Nature Index in 2020, based on our key metric, Share. This placed it ahead of South Korea at eighth, and behind France at sixth, as shown in the first graph below.

The top four countries by this measure (not shown here) are the United States, China, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Among the leading eight countries in the Nature Index by Share, Canada was second only to the UK in delivering value for research funding in 2019, measured by the amount of Share achieved for each US$1 billion spending on research and development.

In that year, Canada achieved a Share of 57.9 per US$1 billion spending, three times more than South Korea or Japan achieved.

Canada has the lowest population density among its closest competitors. For Share per million of population in 2020, it is a distant second to Switzerland.

View the complete visualization, which also shows Canada’s proportion of internationally collaborative papers, compared to other countries, and a map of key areas.