By WANG Ke

Staff reporter from China.org.cn

China and the UK make perfect partners for scientific research, and their bilateral cooperation is becoming ever closer. Yesterday, Research Councils UK (RCUK) in Beijing announced the latest developments in social and scientific work between the two sides.

Chris Godwin, director of the RCUK Office in China, said at a press conference that the UK is an extremely productive research nation and it is China's main partner in the European Union.

He announced that in 2002 the two countries produced less than a thousand joint research publications, but by 2007 this had increased to over 2000.

"In the five years from 2002-2006, twenty topic areas each saw over 100 UK-China joint papers. In one area, Molecular Biology, the impact of the 103 joint papers, as measured by the amount of international attention they attracted, was nearly 8 times the global average," he said.