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 connectivity and competitiveness of Mainland China’s scientific research. Based on publication data about Chinese researchers in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) from the Web of Science (WoS), this study aims to provide a birds-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 over the period 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, with Psychology and Business, Economics, Planning accounting for a high proportion of international collaboration articles, while the proportion of Mainland China-led articles and Q1 articles are relatively higher in the areas of Education, Media & Information, and Community & Social Issues. 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 underlying 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

“…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.…”