The development of computer science research in the People’s Republic of China 2000–2009: a bibliometric study

Abstract

This paper reports a bibliometric study of the development of computer science research in the People's Republic of China in the 21 st century, using data from the Web of Science, JournalCitation Reports and CORE databases. Focusing on the areas of data mining, operating systems and web design, it is shown that whilst the productivity of Chinese research has risen dramatically over the period under review, its impact is still low when compared with established scientific nations such as the USA, the UK and Japan. The publication and citation data for China are compared with corresponding data for the other three BRIC nations (Brazil, Russian and India). It is shown that China dominates the BRIC nations in terms of both publications and citations, but that Indian publications often have a greater individual impact. KeywordsBibliometrics; Citation analysis; Computer science research; People's Republic of China; Research impact; Research productivity Introduction Information and communications technology (ICT) is arguably the most important technologyfor supporting the economic development of a nation and thus for enhancing its population's quality of life. It is hence hardly surprising that the People's Republic of China (hereafter China), as the world's largest developing country, has made very extensive efforts to develop its R&D capabilities in ICT. Most notably, the Ministry of Science and Technology identified this as one of six technologies for funding in the National High Technology Programme (the other areas were biotechnology and agriculture, materials, manufacturing and automation, energy, and resources and the environment (Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, no date)). The programme (which is also called the 863 programme) started in 1986 with the aim of upgrading national industrial competitiveness so 2 that China could compete successfully with established players such as the USA, Japan and the European Union. ICT receives the largest fraction of the extensive government funding that has been made available to the programme (Springut et al., 2011), and a range of statistics attest to the success of this initiative: for example, China is now the world's largest mobile communications market and the largest producer of ICT products (Simon, 2011); and it has 75 of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers, including the second and the fourth fastest (Top500 Computer Sites, 2011).Computer science is one of the key basic sciences underlying ICT developments (other important areas include electronics, informatics and telecommunications), and Guan and Ma Since then it has grown, first steadily (Maier, 1988), and then much more rapidly since the liberalization of the economy. In this paper, we discuss the growth in academic computer science research in China using the methods of bibliometrics (Bar-Ilan, 2008a; Borgman and Furner, 2002;Nicolaisen, 2007;Wilson, 1999).Previous bibliometric studies have demonstrated the contributions that China is making to research...

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