Longitudinal Growth and Cross-Sectional Disparities in China’s Bioinformatics Graduate Education Since 2000

Abstract Over the past decades, driven by the demands of disciplinary development and global competitiveness, China’s graduate education in bioinformatics has made significant strides in cultivating a large cohort of high-caliber interdisciplinary professionals, but some critical questions have not been fully explored yet, e.g., trends of interdisciplinary integration, evolution of degree structure and characteristics of contributors. By retrieving the official graduation statistics data in China and the dissertation metadata in authoritative databases, a systematic empirical analysis was conducted from five aspects: comprehensive evolution of China’s graduate education, bioinformatics-driven biomedical graduate education, bioinformatics-augmented graduate education in computer science, artificial intelligence-powered bioinformatics graduate education, and contributors of bioinformatics graduate education. The following conclusions were drawn: 1) under the overall steady expansion of China’s graduate education, the explosive growth of bioinformatics in both quantity and proportion highlights the significant trend of accelerating interdisciplinary integration in biomedicine- and computer-related graduate education; 2) artificial intelligence is emerging as a core driver propelling the advancement of graduate education in bioinformatics and computer science; 3) the increasing yet relatively lower master-to-doctoral ratio underscores the evolving degree structures and higher specialized demand in the fields; 4) the analysis of contributors exhibits the characteristics of "national-led and local-coordinated" in funders and "monopoly of ministerial universities and rise of provincial universities" in institutions/supervisors. This study revealed critical evidence of longitudinal growth and cross-sectional disparities in China’s bioinformatics graduate education, which could provide a data-driven decision support for building an ecosystem of bioinformatics talent cultivation in China and even internationally.