China's scientific journals see increase in academic influence

China's scientific journals have seen increased academic influence and significant quality improvement in the past decade, according to the Blue Book on China's Scientific Journal Development (2024) recently published by the China Association for Science and Technology.

The book, the eighth in a series, affords an in-depth review and analysis of the overall situation of Chinese science and technology journals and scientific publications.

According to the book, the total number of scientific journals in China has increased from 5,163 in 2022 to 5,211 in 2023, with the 48 new additions primarily being English-language ones.

In terms of academic influence, over the past decade, the total citation frequency and impact factor of China's scientific journals have continued to rise, with annual growth rates reaching 4 percent and 8 percent respectively.

CAST has attributed the upward trajectory of academic impact to the implementation of China's Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan since 2019, an initiative designed to elevate the global stature of Chinese scientific journals through funding and resource support of leading and emerging journals, personnel training and journal clusters piloting.

The professionals working in China's scientific journals exhibit a high level of academic qualifications, with 81.07 percent of English-language journal staff holding master's or doctoral degrees, and 47.19 percent of Chinese-language journal staff having similar ones, it said.

The book suggested that more papers are published in English-language scientific journals in China, with heightened academic influence. In 2022, an average of 101 papers were published in each English-language scientific journal in China, an increase of 3.27 percent compared to 2021. The academic impact of these journals has significantly improved, with the average total citation frequency per journal reaching 617.34 in 2022, an increase of 10.37 percent year-on-year, and the average impact factor per journal rising to 0.717, a growth of 15.83 percent.

The book also revealed a disparity between the large volume of SCI papers published by Chinese scholars and the relatively small number of papers in China's SCI journals. In 2023, Chinese scholars have published 728,700 SCI papers, accounting for about one-third of the global total, but only 33,400 papers were published in SCI journals in China, representing less than 5 percent of the total.

The number of papers in Chinese SCI journals in Q1 category, which refers to the top 25 percent journals of a particular subject area, has increased from 6.28 percent in 2014 to 65.70 percent in 2023, which means that over 60 percent of Chinese journal papers are in this top category.

However, there still exist discrepancies between Chinese-language scientific journals and English-language ones concerning academic quality. The 4,556 Chinese-language scientific journals in China, which represent 87.43 percent of the total, lack support in policies, funding and academic resources compared with their English-language counterparts.

Gao Fu, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the journal Science Bulletin and hLife, said; "Efforts should be made to support innovation to address bottleneck issues, strengthen intellectual property protection, and promote science popularization and public communication".

Xu Nuo contributed to this story.