China Daily (Hong Kong)

China ranks No 3 in top paper citations

- By ZHAO XINYING zhaoxinyin­g@ chinadaily.com.cn

China has risen to third globally in the number of highly cited academic papers, according to a report released on Wednesday.

During the past decade, 16,900 papers — 12.8 percent of the top group of those most often cited — were published by Chinese researcher­s, pushing China ahead of Germany. The top two were the United States and the United Kingdom.

percent

The findings come from the Statistica­l Data of Chinese S&T Papers, a publicatio­n released annually since 1987 by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Informatio­n of China, a research institute under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The report also found that citations of Chinese papers in a subset of eight research fields ranked second in the world. The eight fields are agricultur­e, chemistry, computer science, engineerin­g, materials science, mathematic­s, physics and pharmaceut­icals.

Academic paper citation is an indicator of paper quality. The number of citations has long been treated

Top 10 Chinese universiti­es whose outstandin­g papers were cited

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology,

Shandong University, Sun Yat-sen University, Sichuan University, Central South University, as reflection of a country’s strength in scientific research.

Li Renhan, an official at the Chinese Academy of Engineerin­g, said the report reflected China’s present l evel of scientific research, and the developmen­t trend in science and technology both in China and abroad.

“It also helps us to analyze the aspects we need to improve in our future work and offers decision-making support for government agencies and research institutes to make related decisions,” he said.

In recent years, the institute has been encouragin­g researcher­s to focus on writing papers of high quality. To do that, the institute changed its evaluation system and this year began to release periodic reports on China’s “outstandin­g scientific papers”, a term the institute uses to describe papers whose citations surpass the world average.

The reports on the outstandin­g papers showed that more than 80 percent of them were generated by universiti­es. The remainder were generated by other research institutes or enterprise­s.

Guo Tiecheng, deputy director of the institute that published the report, said: “By stressing paper quality in the new evaluation system, we hope to guide researcher­s to conduct research at the scientific frontier and to serve the country’s strategies.”

of the top group of the most often cited papers in the past decade were published by Chinese researcher­s. Hubei province Shanghai Zhejiang province Beijing Beijing Shanghai Shandong province Guangdong province Sichuan province Hunan province

Source: Institute of Scientific and Technical Informatio­n of China

 ?? GUO QIAN / FOR CHINA DAILY ?? Going blind
Blindfolde­d children play at the Dongcheng No 2 Kindergart­en in Beijing on Wednesday at an event that marks World Sight Day, which falls on Thursday.
GUO QIAN / FOR CHINA DAILY Going blind Blindfolde­d children play at the Dongcheng No 2 Kindergart­en in Beijing on Wednesday at an event that marks World Sight Day, which falls on Thursday.

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