Around six months ago, in the post linked above, Germany’s Continued Underperformance and Portugal’s Escalating AI Obsession, I examined the roots of Portugal’s unusually high academic productivity in artificial intelligence. One result stood out in particular: according to a Scopus-based comparison, Portugal was already producing about 65% more AI-related publications per million inhabitants than Germany.
A similar search carried out today suggests that Germany’s relative position has become even more concerning. Several much smaller countries now show far stronger AI publication intensity than Germany. The gap is particularly striking in the cases of Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates. Compared with Germany’s AI publications per million inhabitants, Cyprus has an advantage of around 237%, and the UAE around 165%, over Germany.
These differences are too large to ignore. They raise an uncomfortable question about Germany’s ability to keep pace in one of the most strategically important scientific fields of this century. The institutional comparison is also revealing. Harvard Medical School alone reports 1,151 Scopus-indexed AI publications, while Germany’s leading university in this search, Technische Universität München, reports 707. The citation gap is also worrying: Germany has only 5 AI-related publications with more than 500 citations, compared with 18 in the United Kingdom and 33 in the United States.
For a country long associated with engineering excellence, scientific strength, industrial leadership, and technological sophistication, these numbers are difficult to dismiss. So the question must be asked: What is happening with Germany? Is Germany underinvesting in AI research? Is its academic system too slow, too fragmented, or too bureaucratic? Is talent moving elsewhere? Or are smaller and more agile countries simply adapting faster to the AI revolution?
Scopus AI-related publications per million inhabitants
