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Today in China, there are more than 8,000 academic journals, of which more than 4,600 can be considered scientific. [1] About 1,400 cover health science (medicine and public health). [2] In 2022, it was reported that China has become one of the top countries in the world in both scientific research output, and also for highly cited academic papers. [3]
Almost all of the scientific journals in China are supported by central, regional, or local governments. Some scientific journals are owned by professional associations. There are very few privately owned scientific journals. Some journals—mainly those supported by the national government—are regarded as high-prestige journals, and authors preferentially select these journals for their best papers. [4] Such top-tier journals include the 67 journals published by the Chinese Medical Association. Those journals and most other academic journals are indexed by major indexing services in China.
Most scientific journals in China are published monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly. A few are published twice a month. The average time to publication is 14.1 months. [5] Most journals are available only in print form or only in electronic form. Most scientific journals in China are published in Chinese; a few have English translations of abstracts for research articles. Some 189 scientific journals are published in English, of which 29 are health-science journals. [6]
Most articles published in English-language scientific journals in China are indexed by Science Citation Index and Engineering Index. [7]
Most scientific journals in China are not published in English, which has meant that much of current scientific development in China is not readily available to non–Chinese-speaking scientists. A large portion of these journals however, also have an abstract in English. In 1999, only 661 Chinese journals were indexed in the international index systems: [8]
As of June 2001, 62 Chinese journals (44 in English) were indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded. [9]
The evaluation criteria for Chinese scientific journals are impact factor, cited number of journal, reaction index, mean citing rate, and non-self-cited rate.[ citation needed ]
The impact factor of Chinese scientific journals is relatively low. In 1999, the top-cited journal—Mining and Geologica Sinica—had an impact factor of 1.487, and the average number of citations per article published in the Chinese journals covered by Science Citation Index was 0.326. One reason for the low impact factor is that Chinese scientists tend to use relatively few references in their publications (average, 6.6 references per article). A second reason is that scientists in China, like those in other countries, prefer to publish their best papers in major or top English-language journals. In fact, for such purposes as promotion to senior positions, Chinese scientists must have published in Western journals. According to the Institute of Science and Technology of China, the number of articles written by Chinese scientists and published in non-Chinese journals increased from 13,134 in 1995 to 24,476 in 1999—a 95% increase.
As of 2022, it was reported in a study published by Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP), that China had become one of the top countries in regard of producing both high quality and high quantity of scientific papers, and accounted for 27.2% of the world's top 1% of most-cited papers in 2019, taking the global lead and surpassing the US who had come second, with 24.9% of the top 1% of most-cited papers. [10] [11] The Economist also concluded that in 2022 China passed both the US and the European Union in the number of high-impact research papers published. [12]
Chinese colleges and universities have few scientific-writing courses, so improvement in scientific writing is slow. Most first-time authors writing in Chinese for publication in China usually follow the format used in the journal to which they are submitting their manuscripts.
To improve scientific publishing in China, the government has instituted initiatives to improve scientific writing. A format for scientific and technical reports, degree theses, and scientific papers has been developed (GB7713-87). The recommendations closely follow international standards, including using the structured abstract for biomedical research articles. By supporting standards set by the government and international bodies, it is hoped that health science journals improve their scientific communication.
A few books about biomedical writing have now been published in China. Also, a program, based in China, to teach biomedical writing and editing has been established with grants from the China Medical Board of New York. The purpose of this program, which began in 1996, is to increase publication of Chinese and other Asian research in English-language biomedical journals both by providing instruction in biomedical writing and by developing editors at the researchers' institutions.
Typically the writing courses have focused on the introduction and discussion sections of articles prepared for health-science journals in China. The introduction section of the paper has tended to be incomplete, so editors and readers do not understand the point of the paper. Editors envisage the introduction as being rather like a funnel, beginning with what is known about the particular problem, leading to what is unknown and important to find out, and ending with the objectives of the research. Chinese authors typically begin the discussion with a reiteration of well-known knowledge, with little attempt to indicate how their research adds to the body of knowledge. The discussion section rarely discusses the limitations of the research.
Typical Chinese manuscripts contain few references. Although that may be a long-standing tradition in Chinese publishing, it also may occur because many university and local libraries in China lack extensive collections of world literature, most articles posted on the World Wide Web are not in free-access scientific journals, and there is generally low awareness of international websites that provide free access to journals, such as Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) and the Directory of Open Access Journals.
A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears.
MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution.
Scientific literature encompasses a vast body of academic papers that spans various disciplines within the natural and social sciences. It primarily consists of academic papers that present original empirical research and theoretical contributions. These papers serve as essential sources of knowledge and are commonly referred to simply as “the literature” within specific research fields.
A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). American Chemical Society converted its printed Chemical Abstract Service into internet-accessible SciFinder in 2008. The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield.
Scientometrics is a subfield of informetrics that studies quantitative aspects of scholarly literature. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.
Eugene Eli Garfield was an American linguist and businessman, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He helped to create Current Contents, Science Citation Index (SCI), Journal Citation Reports, and Index Chemicus, among others, and founded the magazine The Scientist.
The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.
The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines.
A review article is an article that summarizes the current state of understanding on a topic within a certain discipline. A review article is generally considered a secondary source since it may analyze and discuss the method and conclusions in previously published studies. It resembles a survey article or, in news publishing, overview article, which also surveys and summarizes previously published primary and secondary sources, instead of reporting new facts and results. Survey articles are however considered tertiary sources, since they do not provide additional analysis and synthesis of new conclusions. A review of such sources is often referred to as a tertiary review.
The International Journal of Molecular Sciences is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering research in chemistry, molecular physics, and molecular biology. It is published by MDPI and was established in 2000. The editor-in-chief is Maurizio Battino.
Hinari Access to Research for Health Programme was set up by the World Health Organization and major publishers to enable developing countries to access collections of biomedical and health literature. There are up to 15,000 e-journals and up to 60,000 online books available to health institutions in more than 10 countries. Hinari is part of Research4Life, the collective name for five programs - Hinari, AGORA, OARE, ARDI and GOALI. Together, Research4Life provides lower income countries with free or low cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online.
The Scientific World Journal is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering fields in the life sciences ranging from biomedicine to environmental sciences. It was established in 2001 and is published by Hindawi Publishing Corporation. The journal was delisted in the 2015 Journal Citation Reports because of "anomalous citation patterns".
eLife is a not-for-profit, peer-reviewed, open access, science publisher for the biomedical and life sciences. It was established at the end of 2012 by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Max Planck Society, and Wellcome Trust, following a workshop held in 2010 at the Janelia Farm Research Campus. Together, these organizations provided the initial funding to support the business and publishing operations. In 2016, the organizations committed US$26 million to continue publication of the journal.
The Journal of Biomedical Materials Research is a peer-reviewed scientific journals of biomedical material science. It was established in 1967. In 1974, it absorbed Biomedical Materials Symposium (1971–1974). In 1990, it absorbed the journal Journal of Applied Biomaterials (1990–1995). In 2002, it split into two parts, Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A, and Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part B. The two parts are published by John Wiley & Sons.
Predatory publishing, also write-only publishing or deceptive publishing, is an exploitative academic publishing business model, where the journal or publisher prioritizes self-interest at the expense of scholarship. It is characterized by misleading information, deviates from the standard peer review process, is highly non-transparent, and often utilizes aggressive solicitation practices.
BioMed Research International is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering all aspects of biomedical sciences. It was established in 2001 as the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology with Abdelali Haoudi as first editor-in-chief. The journal obtained its current title in 2013 and is published by Hindawi Publishing Corporation.
Semantic Scholar is a research tool for scientific literature powered by artificial intelligence. It is developed at the Allen Institute for AI and was publicly released in November 2015. Semantic Scholar uses modern techniques in natural language processing to support the research process, for example by providing automatically generated summaries of scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, human–computer interaction, and information retrieval.
Endeavour is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Elsevier. It began as a scientific review publication published by Imperial Chemical Industries in 1942, and since has evolved into a scholarly journal covering the fields of history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Its editor-in-chief is Don Opitz.
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