The role of China's English‐language scientific journals in scientific communication

Abstract

Between 1929 and 2002 over 200 English‐language scientific journals were founded in China. The number of China's English edition journals in each discipline is, however, not correlated to the corresponding output of China's articles listed in the ISI's Science Citation Index. Clearly, the goal of these journals is to be internationally recognized. It is shown that this goal is rarely achieved. We think that lack of good‐quality papers, low international visibility and a citation ‘Matthew effect’ are the main causes for the small role played by China's English‐language journals.

Representation of journals from five neighboring European countries in the Journal Citation Reports

“…An earlier study reported a similar lack of relationship between English-language journals from China and Chinese-authored SCI articles in different scientific fields [REN & ROUSSEAU, 2004]. The economic strength of countries in our study was also not related to their representation in the JCR database.…”

The journal download immediacy index (DII): experiences using a Chinese full-text database

“…Of the academic journals in the database the large majority is in Chinese but 400 are in English, confirming the fact that there are some English language journals in China, but that they generally play a small role within the country's S&T system (Ren and Rousseau 2004). CNKI has more than 5,500 customers (universities, public and corporate libraries, hospitals, etc.).…”

Bibliometric analysis of English-language academic journals of China and their internationalization

“…1 Ren and Rousseau also analyzed Journal Citation Report (JCR) data from 2000 and 2001. 2 They found that Chinese Englishlanguage journals are not internationally recognized and have very low international visibility, 2 however they published their paper earlier and did not refer the situation of China's English journals in more recent years.…”

“…[1][2][3][4][5][6] The internationalization of a journal is considered to include features such as use of the English language, international peer reviewers, orientation to an international readership, and submissions by foreign authors. These journals also tend to have an international editorial board, and are indexed by international authoritative databases such as the Science Citation Index (SCI) or Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCIE).…”