RESEARCH ARTICLE

RESEARCH ARTICLE

An analysis of the development of Chinese
STM journals in the past 30 年

Liu Xiaomin

National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 北京, 中国

开放访问

杂志

关键词: author analysis, article analysis, cited articles, Chinese STM journals, CSCD

引文: Xiaomin, L. (2021). An analysis
of the development of Chinese STM
journals in the past 30 年.
Quantitative Science Studies, 2(1),
292–299. https://doi.org/10.1162
/qss_a_00107

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00107

已收到: 31 行进 2020
公认: 17 十月 2020

通讯作者:
Liu Xiaomin
liuxm@mail.las.ac.cn

处理编辑器:
Liying Yang

抽象的

China publishes 5,052 academic journals in science, 技术, and medicine. It ranks third
in terms of the number of publications, behind the United States and the United Kingdom. 在
最近几年, English-language journals have increased annually in China, but there are only
完了 300 English journals published, 占约 6.5% of all published journals,
whereas Chinese journals account for about 93.5%. 使用 30 years’ data from the Chinese
science citation database (CSCD), I compiled statistics on the average number of papers, 这
average number of references, the language of references, the distribution of author age, ETC.
I also analyzed the role of Chinese STM journals in terms of their academic significance. 它
is observed that the average number of journal papers and references per paper has been on
the rise in the past 30 年. English literature accounts for a large proportion of the references,
and the authors are young. The conclusion is that Chinese journals are important for young
scholars to publish their papers, and Chinese scholars widely use international research results
for reference in their research.

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1.

介绍

The importance of academic journals in the scientific community is self-evident. 现在, 关于
42,000 (Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory, 日期不详。) STM academic journals are published world-
宽的. Among them 5,052 (China Association for Science and Technology, 2019) are published in
中国 (多于 3,300 of which are in Ulrichsweb), behind only the United States and the
英国. The history of Chinese STM journals is not long, with around 43% of them
founded after 1990. National Medical Journal of China (available in Chinese and English), 这
earliest published STM journal, was founded in 1915. 在过去 30 年, the number of STM
journals in China has increased rapidly. 多于 330 journals published in the last 5 years are
available in English, accounting for 6.7% of all Chinese STM journals (C-STMJs). C-STMJs are
developing, not only in terms of the number of journals published, but also in their characteristics.
I studied Chinese Science Citation Index (CSCD) data and used quantitative methods to delineate
the development of C-STMJs over the past 30 年.

CSCD was created by the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in
1989 and was China’s first citation database. The mechanism of the CSCD database is very sim-
ilar to the Science Citations Index (SCI), which draws citation networks to reveal the context of
scientific research. It also establishes criteria to select outstanding academic journals and sets
data processing standards to standardize the data of key contents. It currently has three data-
bases, namely CSCD, CSCD-JCR, and CSCD-ESI. CSCD makes full use of citation relationships

版权: © 2021 Liu Xiaomin.
在知识共享下发布
归因 4.0 国际的 (抄送 4.0)
执照.

麻省理工学院出版社

An analysis of the development of Chinese STM journals in the past 30 年

to provide a document database for document retrieval and information discovery. CSCD-JCR is
an annual statistical report of journals based on CSCD data, including CSCD-sourced journal
citation frequency, impact factor, citation/cited half-life, mutual journal citations, feature factors,
number of published papers, and other quantitative indices. It also provides the frequency of
citations for all non-CSCD-sourced journals in 60 类别. CSCD-ESI is a statistical report
of annualized paper publication and influence based on CSCD and SCI data. It includes
published papers by various institutes and provincial and municipal governments, 索引的
by citation of all papers in the past 5 years and the number of highly cited papers, 之中
其他的. Despite having an independent domain name (http://cscd.ac.cn), CSCD also operates
on the Web of Science ( WoS) 平台, which makes it the first non-English citation database
on WoS. As of February 2020, CSCD has 1,229 journals, 5.39 million papers, 多于
75.1 million records of citation data, 关于 250,000 new papers, 以及超过 6 百万
records of citations.

CSCD selects from all Chinese and English STM journals published in China. 在 2019, 1,229
journals passed the selection criteria of CSCD, accounting for 24.32% of all C-STMJs. The selec-
tion uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Quantitative calculation is the
main method for selecting journals, and qualitative evaluation involves the participation of peer
experts. CSCD, through extensive data analysis and trend monitoring, optimized its selection
metric from a type-focused one at the beginning to an impact-focused one now. Impact is con-
sidered on the level of both individual papers and journals. The ratio between the frequency of
citations and the number of cited papers is also taken into account. A journal’s citation of its own
papers is excluded, and only citation by papers from other journals is registered. 全面的, 那里
are eight indicators, including 5-year cited impact factors, eigenfactor scores, ratio of citing
journals, ratio of cited papers to published papers, mutual citations of journals, and average level
of journal in the discipline. After calculating the comprehensive score of the eight indicators,
Bradford’s Law is applied to delineate the thresholds for journal selection in each discipline.
The key to journal selection is to define the disciplinary attributes (张, 刘, & 吴, 2016)
and conduct intradiscipline comparisons among journals. 为此, the influence of a certain
journal in different disciplines is calculated to determine its discipline. Journals that fail to reach
the CSCD quantitative threshold are eliminated. Publications with severe postponements or
violations of publication ethics are also dropped.

在 1989, 只有 312 CSCD journals. Applying Bradford’s Law, it is found that the
ratio of the number of CSCD journals to the total number of C-STMJs fluctuated around 0.23.
With the increase in number of Chinese STM journals, the number of CSCD journals has also
risen accordingly. 有 312 CSCD journals in 1989, 594 在 1995, 和 990 在 1999. 在
2003, 1,040 journals were collected in CSCD and the number has since been relatively stable,
with only small increases. 在 2019, there were 1,229 CSCD journals. They are archived by CSCD
in the language of publication, the majority in Chinese. 的 315 journals included in CSCD
在 1989, 14 were in English; 经过 2019, 225 of them were in English.

By studying CSCD data in the recent three decades, I captured the development of C-STMJ

core journals and features of leading Chinese journals.

2. DATA AND ANALYSIS

The statistics in this article are based on research papers and literature reviews published on
CSCD journals. The features of Chinese journals are described from paper publication, 纸
citations, and author’s age. As the data for 2019 are not yet complete, the data for published
papers in 2019 is not calculated. 此外, the granularity of data processing is different in

Quantitative Science Studies

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An analysis of the development of Chinese STM journals in the past 30 年

different times. The data in this article on paper publication come from 1989–2018, and the data
related to references are from 2002–2018.

According to statistics from 1989 到 2018, the number of published articles per journal (CSCD-
A/J) increased rapidly from 1989 到 2010. CSCD-A/J was 87.79 (文章) 在 1989, 和 200.32 在
2018. 这 2018 number is 2.28 times that of 1989. The highest value of CSCD-A/J appeared
在 2010 在 255.46 文章. 从 2009 到 2013, the number of published articles per journal
remained above 250, and began to decrease in 2014 (数字 1).

Based on the JCR data from SCI (Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Reports, 1997–2018), 这
number of articles published in SCI per journal in 1997-C-STMJ2018 was calculated. The SCI-A/J
value increased slightly amid a generally steady trend. 在 1997, SCI-A/J was 107.2 文章. It in-
有折痕的 1.5 times to 171 articles in 2018.

自从 1997, CSCD-A/J values have been consistently larger than SCI-A/J. 在 1997, CSCD-A/J
曾是 116.52 文章, and in the same period SCI-A/J was 107.2 文章. 那一年 2010 看到了
largest gap between the two with a difference of 121.7 (CSCD-A/J = 255.46, SCI-A/J = 133.8).
The number of papers published in CSCD-J journals has exploded, and the number of papers
published by SCI journals has increased slightly in a steady trend. The indicator of CSCD-A/J can
reveal the trend of papers in Chinese STM journals. The decline in CSCD-A/J has been less sharp
自从 2015. The decline does not mean a weakening of demand for published papers, 反而
that journals and periodicals stepped up their emphasis on paper quality. For a period before
2015, to adapt to the rapid increase in the demand for published papers, journal content was
blindly enlarged. But this expansion quickly showed negative effects. The decline in the quality
of journals was criticized by scholars, which forced some journals to stop publishing as many
papers as possible.

C-STMJs are rarely bilingual and mainly Chinese. From the perspective of scholarly commu-
nication, having English abstracts better disseminates research results. 在 2002, 80.01% of CSCD
journals already had English abstracts, which rose to 84.44% 在 2018. 因此, CSCD was
included in the WoS when more than 80% of its papers had English abstracts, meaning that
more Chinese journals could be understood globally.

在 1989 到 2018, 5.043 million papers were published on CSCD journals by 1996.29 百万
authors. 在 1989, the degree of author collaboration was 2.9, 并在 2018, the degree was 4.7. 所以
during the 30 年, the degree of author collaboration was on the rise. In terms of the number of
authors and the distribution of published papers, the proportion of papers published by a single
author in 1989 曾是 23.14%, but by 2018 this figure was only 3.33%. 在 1989, 的数量
papers published by two coauthors was the largest group, accounting for 27.88% of all the

数字 1. CSCD and SCI: the number of published articles per journal.

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An analysis of the development of Chinese STM journals in the past 30 年

数字 2. Age distribution of first authors.

papers published that year, but by 2018 this figure had dropped to 10.92%. The proportion of the
papers by one to three authors showed a downward trend and the proportion of papers by four or
more authors has been increasing. 在 2018, the proportion of papers by four authors increased by
1.57 times compared to 1989. The number of papers by five authors increased by 1.69 次, 和
the number of papers by six to nine authors increased by 2.62, 2.65, 2.39, 和 2.40 times respec-
主动地. The number of papers with more than 10 authors increased by 1.75 次. 虽然
number of papers with 8–10 authors accounted for a small percentage in all papers (仅有的 3.01%
在 1989), it had risen to 12.59% 经过 2018. 在 1989, the number of papers with one to three authors
占 71.65% of the total, falling to 68.49% 在 2018. These data show that China’s
scientific research model in the past 30 years has shifted from independent research to joint
研究, with cooperation becoming the new normal.

To research the author characteristics of the CSCD journal, I analyzed the ages of authors who
published papers between 2002 和 2018. Age information on around 20% of authors was
可用的. It is typical in China to place special emphasis on the first author, so here I make a
distinction between the age distributions of the first authors and of all authors. After collecting the
author’s age information, the age is divided into a time periods of 5 年, and the proportion
of each age group to the number of authors with age information for the year is calculated. 为了
first authors (FIR-Auth), those between 21 和 40 years old accounted for about 77% of all first
authors, which meant they are productive. First authors under the age of 30 were on the rise,
accounting for 45.18% 在 2018, making them an important author group. The proportion of
authors over the age of 31 was declining gradually, especially between the ages of 36 和 40, 哪个
decreased by 11.01% 在 2018 compared with 2002. The proportion of authors aged 41–45 was
relatively high in 2004–2009, but was only 8.72% 在 2018, the same as in 2002 (数字 2).

The overall age distribution in the group of all authors (All-Auth) is consistent with that of first
authors (First-Auth). 关于 66% of All-Auth were aged between 21 和 40, lower than 77% 在
the Fir-Auth age group of 21–40. The number of authors under the age of 30 is on the rise,
becoming an important group for publishing papers. Unlike Fir-Auth, the proportion of authors
aged between 31 和 40 varied slightly from year to year, but was relatively stable. The pro-
portion of authors aged 51–55 in All-Auth is significantly higher than that in Fir-Auth, 尤其

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An analysis of the development of Chinese STM journals in the past 30 年

后 2014, with a 4–5 percentage points margin, which partly resulted from the cooperation
between young authors and experienced researchers.

The age distribution in All-Auth and Fir-Auth reveals that young professionals under the age
的 30 make up the majority of authors for CSCD journals and the declining trend in the age of
authors is conspicuous.

References show the author’s understanding of extant researches and are the basis of sci-
entific research. 所以, authors’ habits when using literature can also be understood
through reference statistics. 之间 2002 和 2018, CSCD journals had 6.591 million re-
cords of references, and the average number of references per paper increased from 9.18 在
2002 到 24.28 在 2018 (数字 3). Despite a rapid increase, the number was still lower than the
international average of 35 references per paper (Scimago Lab, 2018). CSCD-J’s references
include journal papers, monographs, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, 和
patents. Journal papers take up a significant proportion: 75.23% of the total references in
2002 rising to 87.62% 在 2018. Monographs are another important type of literature, 帐户-
ing for 15.79% of all references in 2002 but falling to a mere 4.15% 在 2018. This shows that
in scientific research, Chinese scholars are more accustomed to using journal literature, 和
that journal papers are becoming more and more important in scientific research.

From the perspective of the annual distribution of journal references, 比较 2018 到 2002,
80% of the total journal citations were published in the preceding 15 年. 在 2018, 8.72% 的
citations were published in the preceding two years, whereas this number for 2002 是 7.72%.

关于 67% of the references are to foreign journals. 自从 2002, the journals cited most often
are Nature, 科学, Journal of the American Chemistry Society, 细胞, New England Journal of
药品, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
物理评论快报, Lancet, Journal of Biological Chemistry, and Physical Review B. 自从
2014, PLOS ONE has become a highly cited journal, behind Nature and Science. 根据
to the SCI-JCR data, these journals are also highly cited jounals in SCI. The journals cited by
Chinese and foreign scholars are consistently similar.

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.

更远, 仅有的 33% of referenced journal papers were Chinese journal articles. 在 2002, 这
percentage was 33.73%. 之间 2007 和 2014, the figure reached about 37%, but by 2018
it had dropped to 33.86%. These data indicate that Chinese scholars are inclined to use Western
文学. 有趣的是, I counted the number of documents whose authors’ names possessed
Chinese characteristics. The proportion of journal papers in Chinese and English journals by
Chinese authors in all CSCD references increased from 46.32% 在 2002 到 58.80% 在 2018.
从这个角度来看, although the citation proportion of English journals is about 66%, 一

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数字 3. CSCD: average references per article.

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An analysis of the development of Chinese STM journals in the past 30 年

桌子 1. Distribution of the number and frequency of cited papers from 1989 到 2018

Frequency of
citation (C)
49,117

Average citation
per paper (C/AC)
3.92

Proportion of cited papers in
all CSCD papers (AC/A) (%)
45.69

Number of cited
CSCD papers (AC)

12,516

13,512

13,908

15,152

15,696

18,729

20,013

36,136

39,228

4,2855

64,726

84,727

90,526

103,413

119,094

130,987

145,135

157,079

171,033

173,553

183,136

186,882

186,565

182,402

175,607

166,259

156,263

137,627

113,295

62,065


1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

全部的

54,977

58,824

62,480

69,767

92,692

101,071

176,974

200,645

229,862

341,141

475,225

507,972

590,767

676,123

724,247

776,537

816,508

819,332

798,483

790,452

788,558

753,876

697,441

640,940

560,598

481,820

364,930

247,943

101,410

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4.07

4.23

4.12

4.44

4.95

5.05

4.90

5.11

5.36

5.27

5.61

5.61

5.71

5.68

5.53

5.35

5.20

4.79

4.60

4.32

4.22

4.04

3.82

3.65

3.37

3.08

2.65

2.19

1.63

4.32

47.17

47.44

48.64

48.74

56.60

56.51

54.32

56.46

60.30

46.54

58.55

60.50

67.95

68.16

68.93

69.43

69.59

66.70

65.74

64.81

65.14

65.76

64.20

63.29

60.12

58.83

53.17

45.10

25.21

59.85

3,018,119

13,050,712

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An analysis of the development of Chinese STM journals in the past 30 年

third of them come from Chinese authors, indicating that Chinese scholars cited scientific re-
search groups that they were more familiar with.

How influential have published papers been since 1989? I looked into all cited CSCD papers
从 1989 到 2018. Among the 5.043 million CSCD papers, 3.013 million were cited (art_cited,
AC), and the yearly average proportion of cited papers in all published papers (AC/A) 曾是 59.85%,
在哪里 2005 和 2006 saw the highest AC/A at 69.43% 和 69.59% 分别. AC/A was
lowest in 1989–1999 and had been on the rise since 2000. Statistics show that at least half of
the papers published every year were cited after publication and attracted scholarly interest.

A total of 3.013 million papers were cited 13.53 million times (桌子 1). The average frequency
of citations per paper (C/A) 曾是 4.32. The peak C/A appeared in 2002 and reached 5.71 次.
自从 2007, the values of AC/A and C/A had been decreasing. Among the Art_cited group, 那些
cited once accounted for about 33%, those cited twice about 20%, and those cited three times
关于 12%. 80% of citation frequencies came from papers cited four or more times, 哪个
account for about 35% of all cited papers. In 1997–2006, where C/A > 5, papers cited once
accounted for less than 30%. 基于数据 2002 和 2006, the peak C/A was in 2002,
and the peak of AC/A was in 2006. 与相比 2002, both the number of cited articles and
the frequency of citation per journal showed an increase, but C/A did not increase with them. 经过
calculating the median of average citation per paper (C), number of cited articles (AC), 和
sum frequency of citation (sum_cit), I found that the medians AC were 7 in both 2002 和 2006,
the medians for C were 86.5 和 81 分别, and the medians for sum_cit were 651 和
630. It could be seen that the C and sum_cit values in 2002 were higher than in 2006, 哪个
indicated that more highly cited papers were published in 2002. The data showed that although
around half of all journal papers were cited, a large number of papers were cited 1–4 times, 和
there were only a few high-impact papers.

3. 结论

The paper analyzed CSCD data on number of published papers, frequency of being cited, 作者
collaboration and use of references to delineate the development of CSTMJs in the most recent
三个十年. The selection criteria of CSCD make it highly representative of STM journals in
China and the rich data from it makes it a good study subject. 第一的, the types of STM journals in
China experienced a rapid expansion, from above 2,000 in the 1990s to 5,052 so far. Among
them English journals grew fastest, by almost eight times from above 40 in the 1990s to more than
330 so far. 在 1999, 35 Chinese journals were collected in SCI and this number grew sevenfold to
250 在 2020. The trend is consistent with the increase of English journals in China. 第二, 这
average annual number of published journal papers exploded exponentially. 在 2018 号码
曾是 2.3 times of that in 1989. 第三, collaboration is more extensive. The average number of
authors per paper was 2.9 在 1989 和 4.7 在 2018, corresponding to the rising trend of interna-
tional collaboration (Adams, 2012; Gui, 刘, & Du, 2019). 第四, the authors of C-STMJs are
becoming noticeably younger. Whether among first authors or all authors, 50% of them were
在下面 35 years old. 第五, the number of references increased, meaning that Chinese scientists
are drawing more on existing research, but the number was still lower than the international
average. The fact that about 33% references are from C-STMJs, whereas about 33% are from
English journals showed that Chinese scholars are referring more to research results from their
international counterparts. The influence of C-STMJs is shown by the fact that 70% of them were
cited after publication.

This article described the general trend of STM journals in China in the past three decades
based on CSCD data only. Statistics suggest that C-STMJs played an important role in domestic

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An analysis of the development of Chinese STM journals in the past 30 年

scholarly communication. But there are also limitations to the findings. Different disciplines
may have their specific publication and citation standards, which is not discussed in this article.
此外, the relation between data was not exploited to a deeper extent, such as whether
authors cited their own works or whether collaborators referenced each others’ publication. 这是
worth noting that STM papers by young scholars have been widely cited.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The author has no competing interests.

资金信息

No funding has been received for this research.

DATA AVAILABILITY

The data for this article can be found at http://www.cscd.ac.cn.

参考

Adams, J. (2012). The rise of research networks. 自然, 490, 335–336.

Scimago Lab. (2018). Scimago journal ranking. https://万维网

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/490335a, PMID: 23075965

.scimagojr.com/.

China Association for Science and Technology. (2019). Blue book

on China’s scientific journal development.

Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Reports. (1997–2018). https://jcr

.clarivate.com/.

Gui, Q., 刘, C。, & Du, D. (2019). Globalization of science and inter-
national scientific collaboration: A network perspective. Geoforum,
105, 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.06.017

Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory. (日期不详。). http://ulrichsweb

.serialssolutions.com/.

张,

J。, Liu X., & Wu L.

(2016). The study of subject-
classification based on journal coupling and expert
subject-classification system. Scientometrics, 107(3),
1149–1170. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016
-1890-9

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Quantitative Science Studies

299RESEARCH ARTICLE image
RESEARCH ARTICLE image

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