This paper examines differences in Chinese and American researchers' uses of social networking sites (SNS). It compares their attitudes and behaviours as determined from data collected in an online survey and a semi-structured focus interview. For various reasons, most international SNS are blocked in China, and we were curious to see how this influences scholarly online communication.

The study of how science is discussed and how scholarly actors interact on social media has increasingly become popular in the field of scientometrics in recent years. While most prior studies focused on research outputs discussed on global platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, the presence of scholarly journals on local platforms was seldom studied, especially in the Chinese social media context. To fill this gap, this study investigates the uptake of WeChat (a Chinese social network app) by the Chinese scholarly journals indexed by the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI). The results show that 65.3% of CSSCI-indexed journals have created WeChat public accounts and posted over 193 thousand WeChat posts in total. At the journal level, bibliometric indicators (e.g., citations, downloads, and journal impact factors) and WeChat indicators (e.g., clicks, likes, replies, and recommendations) are weakly correlated with each other, reinforcing the idea of fundamentally differentiated dimensions of indicators between bibliometrics and social media metrics. Results also show that journals with WeChat public accounts slightly outperform those without WeChat public accounts in terms of citation impact, suggesting that the WeChat presence of scientific journals is mostly positively associated with their citation impact.

Taking Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language as a theoretical base, the article defines the mission of online scientific journal circulation and some key issues needed to be solved at first; then via amount of empirical research on practical circulation activities, it figures out some optimal solutions for the issues, namely some sub-patterns consisting of the circulation pattern; finally it discusses and adjusts the research results.

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