A comparative study of domestic and cross‐country impact of Chinese and U.S. publications in chemistry

Abstract

Based on publications in Chemistry in 2015, this paper investigated the citation impact on domestic and foreign scholarly communities of Chinese and US publications, and to what extent does such impact relate to international collaboration and government funding. First‐ or corresponding authorship in international collaboration is defined as dominance and is taken into consideration. Citations to publications are designated as domestic citations (Chinese or US citations), partner citations or other citations according to overlap of countries of citing and cited publications. Significant difference exists in the two countries. Most citations of Chinese publications are from domestic and partner countries, with domestic citations being the mainstay. In contrast, US papers receive more other citations than domestic or partner citations, and citations from partner countries contribute significantly. US papers have higher global impact than those of China. High domestic citation propensity is associated with non‐international collaboration, dominance of focal country in international collaboration, and national funding support. Such phenomenon is more pronounced in Chinese papers. In other words, citation impact of Chinese publications is more limited in domestic community, whereas that of the US is more global.

Measuring the citation context of national self‐references

“…They found that all countries are more likely to cite other papers from the same country, yet publications from the United States are cited by researchers from all countries. Similarly, Cai et al (2019) compared the research impact between China and the United States in Chemistry. They discovered that China's publications mainly benefit from other domestic research, whereas publications from the United States have more depth and breadth of influence throughout the world.…”