Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Twenty years of Chinese social sciences towards internationalization (1998–2017): a knowledge sources perspective

  • Published:
Scientometrics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This study uncovers the internationalization of Chinese social sciences in knowledge sources through the quantitative analysis of foreign language references cited by China’s domestically published social science papers. It’s found that in the 20 years from 1998 to 2017, the number and proportion of international knowledge sources utilized in Chinese social sciences increased greatly, and the distribution of languages became more concentrated in English. For journals as major international knowledge sources, Chinese social scientists consistently preferred those indexed by Web of Science, and their citation pattern conforms to Garfield’s Law of Concentration. Some of the disciplines continuously focused on international journals in their fields, but others increasingly utilized interdisciplinary knowledge. The strong demand of Chinese social scientists for journals with high impact was basically stable over 20 years, while older articles instead of recent ones were preferred generally and increasingly. On the basis of the above findings, this study further discloses that China’s knowledge production in social sciences also experienced rapid internationalization like its knowledge utilization, and the association between international knowledge production and utilization is statistically significant at the discipline level and journal level. Finally, policy-related issues and enlightenments for social sciences in non-English speaking countries are discussed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See http://cpc.people.com.cn/n1/2016/0519/c64094-28361550.html.

References

  • Ahlgren, P., Colliander, C., & Sjögårde, P. (2018). Exploring the relation between referencing practices and citation impact: A large-scale study based on Web of Science data. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 69(5), 728–743.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Basu, A., Foland, P., Holdridge, G., & Shelton, R. D. (2018). China’s rising leadership in science and technology: Quantitative and qualitative indicators. Scientometrics, 117(1), 249–269.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bornmann, L. (2016). Scientific revolution in scientometrics: The broadening of impact from citation to societal. In Sugimoto C. R. (Ed.), Theories of informetrics and scholarly communication (pp. 347–359). De Gruyter Saur.

  • Brainard, J., & Normile, D. (2022). China rises to first place in most cited papers. Science, 377(6608), 799.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Canagarajah, A. S. (1996). “Nondiscursive” requirements in academic publishing, material resources of periphery scholars, and the politics of knowledge production. Written Communication, 13(4), 435–472.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chen, H. (2007). On the influence of German law on modern and contemporary China. Deutschland-Studien, 22(1), 29–32. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Chen, K., Ren, X. T., Yang, G. L., & Qin, H. B. (2022). The other side of the coin: The declining of Chinese social science. Scientometrics, 127(1), 127–143.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chen, L., Yu, L., & Zhang, L. (2021). Research on the impact of citation internationalization on the quality of academic journals: Taking CSSCI economics journal as an example. Information Studies: Theory & Application, 44(12), 26–33. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheng, Z. (2016). The History and reality of Japanese language teaching in China since 1949. Theory and Modernization, 5, 123–128. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Chi, P. S. (2019). The field-specific reference patterns of periodical and nonserial publications. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 70(3), 283–292.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clarivate. (2012). CSSC Category to Web of Science Category Mapping 2012. Retrieved December 8, 2022, from http://help.prod-incites.com/inCites2Live/filterValuesGroup/researchAreaSchema/chinaSCADCSubjCat.html.

  • Clarivate. (2022). Journal Citation Reports: Quartile rankings and other metrics. Retrieved December 8, 2022, from https://support.clarivate.com/ScientificandAcademicResearch/s/article/Journal-Citation-Reports-Quartile-rankings-and-other-metrics?language=en_US.

  • Cohen, W. M., & Levinthal, D. A. (1990). Absorptive capacity: A new perspective on learning and innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35, 128–152.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Feng, H., Beckett, G. H., & Huang, D. (2013). From ‘import’ to ‘import-export’ oriented internationalization: The impact of national policy on scholarly publication in China. Language Policy, 12, 251–272.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Flowerdew, J., & Li, Y. (2009). English or Chinese? The trade-off between local and international publication among Chinese academics in the humanities and social sciences. Journal of Second Language Writing, 18(1), 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Garfield, E. (1971). The mystery of transposed journal lists–wherein Bradford’s Law of Scattering is generalized according to Garfield’s Law of Concentration. Current Contents, 17, 5–6.

    Google Scholar 

  • Glänzel, W., Debackere, K., Thijs, B., & Schubert, A. (2006). A concise review on the role of author self-citations in information science, bibliometrics and science policy. Scientometrics, 67(2), 263–277.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gong, K., & Cheng, Y. (2022). Patterns and impact of collaboration in China’s social sciences: Cross-database comparisons between CSSCI and SSCI. Scientometrics, 127(10), 5947–5964.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gong, K., Xie, J., Cheng, Y., & Ke, Q. (2020). Research on the citation impact of reference internationalization. Documentation, Information & Knowledge, 2, 102–112. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Gong, K., Xie, J., Cheng, Y., Larivière, V., & Sugimoto, C. R. (2019). The citation advantage of foreign language references for Chinese social science papers. Scientometrics, 120(3), 1439–1460.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gordin, M. D. (2015). Scientific Babel: How science was done before and after global English. University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hammarfelt, B., & De Rijcke, S. (2015). Accountability in context: Effects of research evaluation systems on publication practices, disciplinary norms, and individual working routines in the faculty of Arts at Uppsala University. Research Evaluation, 24(1), 63–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • International Organization for Standardization. (1997). Information and documentation - Rules for the abbreviation of title words and titles of publications (ISO Standard No. 4:1997). Retrieved December 8, 2022, from https://www.iso.org/standard/3569.html.

  • Jing, L., & Lu, W. (2022). Research on the development status and evaluation of Chinese humanities and social sciences journals in the new era. Management World, 38(5), 131–140. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Kang, L. (2018). Social sciences, humanities and liberal arts: China and the West. European Review, 26(2), 241–261.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Khelfaoui, M., Larrègue, J., Larivière, V., & Gingras, Y. (2020). Measuring national self-referencing patterns of major science producers. Scientometrics, 123, 979–996.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kulczycki, E., Guns, R., Pölönen, J., Engels, T. C., Rozkosz, E. A., Zuccala, A. A., ... & Sivertsen, G. (2020). Multilingual publishing in the social sciences and humanities: A seven-country European study. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71(11), 1371–1385.

  • Kulczycki, E., Engels, T. C., Pölönen, J., Bruun, K., Dušková, M., Guns, R., & Zuccala, A. (2018). Publication patterns in the social sciences and humanities: evidence from eight European countries. Scientometrics, 116, 463–486.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Larivière, V., Archambault, É., & Gingras, Y. (2008). Long-term variations in the aging of scientific literature: From exponential growth to steady-state science (1900–2004). Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59(2), 288–296.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levenshtein, V. I. (1966). Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady, 10(8), 707–710.

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Li, X. (2003). On the import of electronic resources from aboard. Journal of Academic Libraries, 4, 40–42. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in a global context: The politics and practices of publishing in English. Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Liu, W., Hu, G., Tang, L., & Wang, Y. (2015). China’s global growth in social science research: Uncovering evidence from bibliometric analyses of SSCI publications (1978–2013). Journal of Informetrics, 9(3), 555–569.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu, X. (2008). Current situation and trend analysis of importing foreign electronic information resources for university libraries in China. Library Tribune, 5, 93–95. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Liu, X. (2021). An analysis of the development of Chinese STM journals in the past 30 years. Quantitative Science Studies, 2(1), 292–299.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mammola, S., Fontaneto, D., Martínez, A., & Chichorro, F. (2021). Impact of the reference list features on the number of citations. Scientometrics, 126(1), 785–799.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Manzenreiter, W., & Wieczorek, I. (2008). Reflections on the trajectories of social science research in contemporary Japan. Social Science Japan Journal, 11(1), 83–97.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marginson, S. (2022). ‘All things are in flux’: China in global science. Higher Education, 83(4), 881–910.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McKiernan, E. C., Bourne, P. E., Brown, C. T., Buck, S., Kenall, A., Lin, J., & Yarkoni, T. (2016). How open science helps researchers succeed. eLife, 5, e16800.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mees, K. (1918). The production of scientific knowledge. Nature, 100, 355–358.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ministry of Education of the PRC. (2011). “Going out” plan for philosophy and social sciences in higher education institutions. Retrieved December 8, 2022, from http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A13/s7061/201111/t20111107_126303.html.

  • Ministry of Education of the PRC. (2020). Opinions on breaking the bad orientation of “paper-only” in the evaluation of philosophy and social science research in universities. Retrieved December 8, 2022, from http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A13/moe_2557/s3103/202012/t20201215_505588.html.

  • Pang, X., & He, Q. (2021). Structural power and the evolution of the international system in global value chains. Social Sciences in China, 9, 26–46. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Price, D. J. D. S. (1970). Citation measures of hard science, soft science, technology, and nonscience. In C. E. Nelson & D. K. Pollock (Eds.), Communication among scientists and engineers (pp. 3–22). Lexington: Heath Lexington Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Quan, W., Chen, B., & Shu, F. (2017). Publish or impoverish: An investigation of the monetary reward system of science in China (1999–2016). Aslib Journal of Information Management, 69(5), 486–502.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ren, C. (2016). Inheritance and acceptation of German jurisprudence methodology in China—On the scientification and systematization of China’s civil legislation. Gansu Social Sciences, 6, 177–182. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Rijcke, S. D., Wouters, P. F., Rushforth, A. D., Franssen, T. P., & Hammarfelt, B. (2016). Evaluation practices and effects of indicator use-a literature review. Research Evaluation, 25(2), 161–169.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rowley, J., & Sbaffi, L. (2021). Investigating gender differences in journal selection decisions: A survey of academic researchers. Learned Publishing, 34(3), 294–304.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shao, J. F., & Shen, H. Y. (2012). Research assessment and monetary rewards: The overemphasized impact factor in China. Research Evaluation, 21(3), 199–203.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shin, K. Y. (2007). Globalization and the national social science in the discourse on the SSCI in South Korea. Korean Social Science Journal, 1(1), 93–116.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shu, F., Quan, W., Chen, B., Qiu, J., Sugimoto, C. R., & Larivière, V. (2020). The role of Web of Science publications in China’s tenure system. Scientometrics, 122, 1683–1695.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Song, Y., Ma, F., & Yang, S. (2015). Comparative study on the obsolescence of humanities and social sciences in China: Under the new situation of web. Scientometrics, 102(1), 365–388.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • State Education Commission of the PRC. (1994). Opinions on strengthening and improving humanities and social science research in higher education institutions. Retrieved December 8, 2022, from https://www.pkulaw.com/chl/fb376fe0f1f950aabdfb.html.

  • Su, J., Zhai, Q., & Landström, H. (2015). Entrepreneurship research in China: Internationalization or contextualization? Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 27(1–2), 50–79.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Su, X., Deng, S., & Shen, S. (2014). The design and application value of the Chinese Social Science Citation Index. Scientometrics, 98(3), 1567–1582.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tollefson, J. (2018). China declared world’s largest producer of scientific articles. Nature, 553(7686), 390–391.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vera-Baceta, M. A., Thelwall, M., & Kousha, K. (2019). Web of Science and Scopus language coverage. Scientometrics, 121(3), 1803–1813.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, B., Wu, H., Shao, Y., Feng, Y., & Zhu, B. (2022). 2021 Chinese University Library Development Report. Retrieved December 8, 2022, from http://www.scal.edu.cn/tjpg/202211210351.

  • Wang, C., & Peters, M. A. (2023). Contemporary Chinese Marxism: Disciplines, teaching platforms and status quo of basic academic research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(8), 877–887.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wang, H. (2017). The publishing, dissemination, and influences of Japanese social science works in China in the early 20th century. Publishing Research, 12, 101–103. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang, X. (2019). The development of Chinese discourse: Localization of Western social sciences and scientifized Confucianism. Journal of University of Jinan (Social Science Edition), 29(6), 5–7. (in Chinese).

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Wen, W., Zhou, L., & Hu, D. (2022). Navigating and negotiating global science: Tensions in China’s national science system. Studies in Higher Education, 47(12), 2473–2486.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, J. (2017). International publishing: Motivations, values and paths. Foreign Languages and Their Teaching, 1, 1–8. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Xu, X. (2020). China ‘goes out’ in a centre-periphery world: Incentivizing international publications in the humanities and social sciences. Higher Education, 80(1), 157–172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, X. (2021). A policy trajectory analysis of the internationalisation of Chinese humanities and social sciences research (1978–2020). International Journal of Educational Development, 84, 102425.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, X., Oancea, A., & Rose, H. (2021a). The impacts of incentives for international publications on research cultures in Chinese humanities and social sciences. Minerva, 59(4), 469–492.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, X., Rose, H., & Oancea, A. (2021b). Incentivising international publications: Institutional policymaking in Chinese higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 46(6), 1132–1145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Xu, X., Xie, J., Sun, J., & Cheng, Y. (2023). Factors affecting authors’ manuscript submission behaviour: A systematic review. Learned Publishing, 36(2), 285–298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yan, E. (2016). Disciplinary knowledge production and diffusion in science. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(9), 2223–2245.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yang, R., Xie, M., & Wen, W. (2019). Pilgrimage to the West: Modern transformations of Chinese intellectual formation in social sciences. Higher Education, 77, 815–829.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yu, L., & Zhang, Z. (2020). Can the foreign-language references improve the influence of academic journals. Library Tribune, 40(1), 111–116. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, D., & Zhao, L. (2018). Research on CASHL’s deep subject services under the background of “double first-rate” construction. Library and Information Service, 62(9), 56–62. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, H., Patton, D., & Kenney, M. (2013). Building global-class universities: Assessing the impact of the 985 Project. Research Policy, 42(3), 765–775.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, L., & Glänzel, W. (2017). A citation-based cross-disciplinary study on literature aging: Part I—The synchronous approach. Scientometrics, 111(3), 1573–1589.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang, L., Shang, Y., Huang, Y., & Sivertsen, G. (2020). Toward internationalization: A bibliometric analysis of the social sciences in Mainland China from 1979 to 2018. Quantitative Science Studies, 2(1), 376–408.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zheng, J., & Wu, H. (2022). Translating rhetoric into reality: Using the internationalization of humanities and social sciences in Chinese universities as the case. Higher Education, 84, 611–628.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zheng, Y., & Gao, A. X. (2016). Chinese humanities and social sciences scholars’ language choices in international scholarly publishing: A ten-year survey. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 48(1), 1–16.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Zhou, P., Su, X., & Leydesdorff, L. (2010). A comparative study on communication structures of Chinese journals in the social sciences. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61(7), 1360–1376.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhou, P., Thijs, B., & Glänzel, W. (2009). Is China also becoming a giant in social sciences? Scientometrics, 79(3), 593–621.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zong, X., & Zhang, W. (2019). Establishing world-class universities in China: Deploying a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the net effects of Project 985. Studies in Higher Education, 44(3), 417–431.

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Zou, Z. (2000). The development, functions, and significance of Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index. Journal of Nanjing University (Philosophy, Humanities and Social Sciences), 4, 145–154. (in Chinese).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This work uses Web of Science data by Clarivate Analytics provided by the Indiana University Network Science Institute and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University. The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. 21TQC008). The author also appreciates two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Funding

This study was supported by the Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. 21TQC008).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Journalism and Communication, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, 210097, China

    Kaile Gong

Authors
  1. Kaile Gong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kaile Gong.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Ethical approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals. This study does not involve human participants and informed consent was therefore not required.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

According to a conversion table, which is used by Clarivate (2012) to map the “Discipline List for Degree Awarding and Talent Training” by the Ministry of Education of the PRC to the Web of Science Categories, the two-step mapping approach is adopted to map 11 CSSCI disciplines to 46 non-repetitive Web of Science Categories (see Fig. 13).

Fig. 13
figure 13

Two-step mapping from 11 CSSCI disciplines to 46 non-repetitive WoS subjects

Full size image

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Gong, K. Twenty years of Chinese social sciences towards internationalization (1998–2017): a knowledge sources perspective. Scientometrics 128, 6373–6402 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04859-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04859-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation