China Research

China is a country with outspoken scientific ambitions, particularly expressed by President Xi Jinping. This is certainly a logical approach in order to achieve the important Chinese goal of “of raising domestic content of core components and materials to 40 percent by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025” which  means that “reducing reliance on foreign technologies involves creating and developing companies that can innovate through research and development, dominate domestically, and produce competitive exports…” (https://isdp.eu/content/uploads/2018/06/Made-in-China-Backgrounder.pdf). To get there, strong technological progress is certainly needed – based on successful scientific research.

“Science” – a key word in today’s China

A few days ago, I saw an article in People’s Daily that made me very curious. The headline was “China surpasses U.S. in publishing most influential academic papers: report” (http://en.people.cn/n3/2023/0921/c90000-20074482.html). According to this report, China counts for almost one third of all academic papers that were published in 2022 in the most influential international journals (i.e. 16348 Chinese contributions out of totally 54 002). Among these publications were 1929 Chinese papers described as “hot” compared to 1592 from the U.S.

Regarding the size and ambitions of academic China, the rise to number one in the publication area may be plausible. However, some questions and uncertainties remain in my mind, particularly since my trust in Chinese statistics has been limited for many years. Some comments should be mentioned according to my understanding of the report (see also more about the publishing institution “Istic” – Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, https://www.istic.ac.cn/html/1/529/558/index.html):

• The analysis of giving China the first place in this ranking of global scientific publications is made in China and therefore extremely difficult to go through and check out. At least in my view, transparency still seems insufficient.
• It would be interesting to know which journals that have been selected as high-level international journals and to what extent Chinese journals are included in this ranking process.
• It would be good to be informed about the criteria of a “hot” research paper.

I have been trying during quite a long time to understand more about China’s international research standing. Sure, there should have been interesting progress in the past 10-20 years. But why is access to the details so difficult to find and obtain?

Hubert Fromlet
Affiliate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University
Editorial board

Back to Start Page