China’s efforts to reduce reliance on international academic journals is facing resistance from young academics returning from overseas who say it contradicts the country’s vision to build world-class universities, a new study by Chinese researchers has found.
In recent years, the Chinese government has called for a reversal of the ‘SCI [Science Citation Index] paper only’ mentality of researchers and for a shift away from overreliance on publishing in prestigious international journals. China has around 4,800 domestically produced research journals, some of them publish in English.
China’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology jointly released guidelines in 2020 which caution against using SCI papers as the most important criterion for evaluating academic research.
The shift away from international publishing was first announced by President Xi Jinping in 2018. Speaking at an education conference, Xi said China should have its own academic standards and norms, instead of being led significantly by Western ideas or standards.
But despite projections at the time that this would lead to a drop in international publications by Chinese researchers, young academics continue to be encouraged and endorsed by universities to publish high-quality papers in renowned international journals, according to an article published in leading science journal Nature by researchers from China’s Southwest University, Southern University of Science, and Shenzhen Polytechnic University.
The study is based on interviews with a group of Chinese early career returnee academics (ECRAs) which examines their motivations to write and publish in English.
Self-contradictory logic
Many respondents questioned the underlying “self-contradictory” logic between China’s aim of building world-class universities based on research indicators, while at the same time devaluing international publishing.
“Our slogan is to build world-class universities in China, but without international publications how can scholars around the world or global academia acknowledge you are world-class?” one interviewee told the authors.
International peer-reviewed and indexed journals represent high quality and rigorous standards for academics, and publishing in these journals is not only conducive to the personal development of young academics but also raises the bar for the overall quality of research, the article noted.
The authors also found that differences between Western and Chinese academic and research cultures have a significant influence on ECRAs’ preference to write and publish in English.
Notably, respondents were critical of the Chinese style of research, which they say emphasises practical applications or solutions and downplays evidence.
The analytical, evidence-based Western approach is favoured by ECRAs and is an incentive for them to publish in English rather than Chinese.
‘Foreign journals first’ approach
Over recent decades, China’s important scientific research outcomes have primarily been first reported in foreign journals.
While the impact factor (based on the number of citations) of Chinese journals has been increasing year by year, many have received negative reviews in academic circles.
Researchers have said a longer approval process, limitations on length, and the fact that reviews are often conducted by non-experts drive their reluctance to submit to domestic publications.
As a result, the publishing of cutting-edge scientific research in overseas journals has persisted in China and is still viewed as a path to global recognition.
In 2022, the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development think tank, in a metadata analysis of all published papers funded by the China’s National Natural Science Foundation (NNSF), which is administered by the Ministry of Science and Technology to promote and finance basic and applied research, found that the higher the research quality of a project, the lower the proportion of research outcomes published in Chinese.
The academy provided recommendations to counter this. In addition to encouraging more academics to publish in Chinese, it called for renewed efforts to develop China’s own English-language scientific journals to enhance the country’s “discourse power” in fundamental research.
Room for discretion
The Nature study on ECRAs noted that following the release of the 2020 guidelines, the government had expected to see prompt implementation by higher education institutions.
However, universities were allowed some discretion, due to a lack of national-level platforms for “coordination, influence, and collaboration on creating shared tools and information resources, or for agreement on the definitions, criteria, and protocols needed for the procedures”, it said.
Some Chinese universities have since introduced measures including contextualised, alternative assessment, the study noted. One example is “representative achievements” which refers to a scholar’s perceived most important and valuable achievements in a certain field.
“At the institutional level new evaluation schemes were introduced to highlight the key role that representative achievements play in assessment,” one interviewee said.
“Our representative publications will be evaluated in terms of novelty, quality, academic influence and practical contribution,” the interviewee said, noting they must compete with others on these key indicators.
A common practice is for researchers to compile their own journal lists, according to study participants.
“Now, we don’t aim at SSCI [Social Science Citation Index]: we have made a new journal list of our own. We also classify them [the journals] and encourage academics to publish in higher-level journals,” said an interviewee in the humanities and social sciences disciplines.
This was echoed by Dr Mandy Li, a recent postdoctoral graduate in electrical engineering from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“In the past, we would require the publication of SSCI papers, which was a one-size-fits-all approach, but now we have been using a catalogue,” she told University World News.
“The papers that can be regarded as meeting graduation requirements include [publication in] SSCI journals and some domestic high-level journals, and they will both be listed. Some other universities may be more specific, including some journals that are not SSCI and are not as esteemed, and removing some lower-quality SSCI journals from the catalogue,” Li added.
Debate among scholars
Meanwhile, discussions around the language in which research outcomes should first be published continues among scholars.
This week, the country’s sixth lunar exploration mission, the Chang’e-6, brought back to Earth the first ever geological sample from the far side of the moon. It sparked intense speculation on where and in what language the historic findings will first be made public.
“We certainly hope that some of our country’s groundbreaking scientific and technological achievements can appear in China’s top journals, so that we can expand our influence,” an editor with the Science China Press, a scientific journal publisher of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post newspaper earlier this month.
When China’s Chang’e-5 mission retrieved the first lunar samples in decades from the moon’s near side in 2020, the first research was carried out by a joint team of Chinese and Western scientists and appeared in English in Science magazine in October 2021.
This was followed by three more papers published by Nature in the same month.
Rewards for English-language publication
And it would appear that under China’s current evaluation system, academics continue to be rewarded for work published in prestigious English-language journals.
Earlier this month, Chinese media widely reported that two universities – Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine and Guizhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine – awarded CNY1 million (US$138,000) each to two teams for publishing papers in Nature.
Zhu Jiapeng, a professor at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, was part of the team that received one of the CNY1 million awards after the team became the first from the university to publish a paper in Nature in 70 years.
However, Zhu suggested in official media that people should pay more attention to his research rather than the fact he had a paper published in a top international journal.
Peng Li, an associate professor at Guizhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and his team also received CNY1 million for their paper in Nature, the first from Guizhou Province to publish in the journal.
Peng has since been promoted to full professor and deputy director of the medical studies laboratory at the hospital affiliated with the university. Liu Xingde, president of Guizhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said the reward was for outstanding academic results and the contribution Peng has made in medicine.
Chu Zhaohui, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Educational Sciences, was quoted by the official China Daily newspaper saying publishing in top journals can increase the reputation of a university, increasing its competitiveness in attracting top students, and in getting government resources and funds, which is why the two universities gave such large cash rewards.
Such reports have divided opinion among academics about whether such generous remuneration is justified. Some acknowledged that getting published in Nature is a hard-won accomplishment, but others said academic success should not be equated with journal publications.
In the medical sector in recent years numerous cases of paper retractions and fraud have been cause for caution, said Xiong Bingqi, director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute in Beijing.
University World News
