Toward internationalization: A bibliometric analysis of the social sciences in Mainland China from 1979 to 2018

Abstract

The past 40 years have witnessed profound changes in the international competitiveness of Mainland China’s scientific research. Based on publication data from Chinese researchers in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) from the Web of Science (WoS), this study aims to provide a bird’s-eye view of how social science research in Mainland China has internationalized over the past four decades. The findings show that the number of social science articles published by Chinese authors in international journals has experienced a noticeable increase, and the collaboration networks of researchers from Mainland China have broadened, with the number of articles with a Chinese first author showing a strong upward trend. In addition, findings show that Chinese scholars are published in a wider range of journals, and there has been a steady increase in their appearance in higher impact journals (influenced in part by certain journals). Finally, different social science disciplines show various degrees of internationalization . This study provides a broad view from which to examine the internationalization process in Mainland China’s social science landscape in the last four decades, while also noting some of the possible explanations for these changes, thereby deepening our understanding of social science research stemming from the region.

Uses of the Journal Impact Factor in national journal rankings in China and Europe

“…Still, WoS journals are ranked relatively higher in the Polish system (Korytkowski & Kulczycki, 2019), which explains why this country shows a higher degree of agreement with the other WoS-based systems. Journal inclusion in WoS or Scopus is not given specific credit within the Nordic journal rankings, but this information is given to panels, and citation indicators are also used if available (Sivertsen, 2018). Nevertheless, journal assessments are primarily focused on the quality, reputation, integrity, and transparency of their editorial and peer-review operations, including their contributions to research, scholarly communication, and open science (Pölönen et al, 2020).…”

“…Use of the JIF for the evaluation of journals has not been contested in the same way; however, alternative indicators for the same purpose have been proposed (Waltman, 2016). Therefore, this paper aims to investigate different uses of JIFs in national journal rankings across all fields, and to discuss the merits of supplementing journal metrics with expert assessment in this context.. We know from our earlier studies concerning scholarly publishing practices across the social sciences and humanities in Europe (e.g., Kulczycki et al, 2020;Petr et al, 2021) and China (Zhang et al, 2021) that these practices (which may include publishing in books both in English and in domestic languages) are only partly covered by journals indexed in Web of Science. Hence, there is a need for supplementing metrics with expert assessment in these areas.…”

Journal Evaluation Systems: Evolution and Practices in China’s Social Sciences

“…Additionally, the prestige and impact of a discipline's journals inform many research assessments, performance evaluations, and funding systems (Huang et al, 2021). Chinese researchers are now the largest contributor to international journals indexed by the Web of Science (Zhang et al, 2021) -and the social science journal evaluation systems in China have positively promoted journal development and academic innovation. These systems differ in their evaluation methods and metrics, depending on their evaluation purposes.…”

Making journals more international: Language subject differences and impact performance

“…Therefore, the measurement of journal internationalization from the perspective of geographically representative scholarship has reached a consensus (Begeny, 2018; Begeny et al, 2018; Dyachenko, 2014; Dymond et al, 2000). Unfortunately, current studies are exploratory and descriptive and rarely construct bibliometric measures for a journal's international orientation (Yoon et al, 2023; Zhang et al, 2021). One exceptional study is Moed et al (2020), who employed two indicators to provide an overview of the internationality orientation of journals within the Scopus database; that is, the percentage of papers (co‐)authored by researchers from the country publishing the largest number of papers in the journal (INO‐P) and the percentage of citations by researchers from the country contributing the largest number of citations to the journal (INO‐C).…”