Report: China's scientific journal capacity needs enhancement

China's scientific journals have seen a steady increase in both their numbers and the volume of papers published, yet there is still room for improvement in their overall scale and impact, according to a recent report.

The blue book on China's scientific journal development revealed that 247 Chinese international journals were included in the Science Citation Index (SCI) last year, accounting for 1.7 percent of the 40,000 total SCI papers published in 2024.

Published by the Service Center for Societies of the China Association for Science and Technology, the blue book said that the academic quality and global recognition of these journals have steadily improved.

The citation impact of papers published in these journals reached 5.11 last year, surpassing the 3.51 for all international papers authored by Chinese scholars and the global average of 2.77. Additionally, 63.2 percent of the journals were positioned in the top quarter of Journal Citation Reports (JCR), and 68.7 percent of the papers published in China's journals were in the top quarter of the JCR, up from 50 percent in 2022.

Despite an improvement in publishing volume, with 61 percent of China's journals seeing an increase in published papers last year, this scale still fell short compared to the over 830,000 international papers published by Chinese scholars. This highlights the need to enhance the overall carrying capacity of China's domestic journal platforms, the book said.

Furthermore, 88 percent of the papers published in China's journals last year were authored by Chinese scholars. However, this represented only 4.2 percent of the total international papers published by Chinese scholars, indicating that more than 95 percent of their work is still being published in overseas journals. This underscores that China's publishing capacity for international scientific and technological journals has not yet met the publication demands of local research outputs, and there remains significant progress to be made in developing world-class international journals.