China ranks first in number of papers published in world's most influential journals

Replacing the United States, China ranked first in the world for the first time in the number of papers published in the most influential journals worldwide covering nearly 200 disciplines last year, according to Chinese statistics released on Wednesday.

China also ranked first in the world in terms of the number of high-level international journal papers and citations.

The statistics were announced by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China based on an analysis of papers published by Chinese scientists at home and abroad in 2022.

Since 1987, the ISTIC, a subsidiary of the Ministry of Science and Technology, has been responsible for collecting such data. It regularly publishes an overall analysis report on the output of Chinese scientific and technological papers every year.

Among the batch of statistics released by the institute, the most notable one is that China surpassed the US to become the nation with the most academic papers published in the world's most influential journals.

The most influential journals in each discipline refer to those that have had the most impact in each field. In 2022, there were 159 highly influential journals globally covering 178 disciplines.

And last year, China contributed 16,349 papers to these journals, accounting for 30.3 percent of the global total, exceeding the US for the first time.

Furthermore, China also retained its first place global ranking in terms of the overall number of papers and citations published in high-level international journals last year.

According to the ISTIC, those publications are representative scientific journals that cover various disciplines worldwide, each of which ranks among the top 10 percent of journals worldwide based on their impact factors and total citations. Each has an annual publication of more than 50 academic papers and review articles.

In 2022, there were 371 representative journals covering various disciplines, publishing more than 340,000 papers. About 27 percent of those papers had first authors and first affiliations from China, with a total citation count of 649,600.