China's scientific journals have made significant strides in their academic influence and quality improvements over the past decade, according to the Blue Book on China's Scientific Journal Development (2024), which was recently published by the China Association for Science and Technology.

The Blue Book, the eighth in an annual series, offers a detailed analysis of the current state of Chinese science and technology journals. It reports that the total number of scientific journals in China rose from 5,163 in 2022 to 5,211 in 2023, with 48 new titles, most in English.

In terms of academic influence, the report highlights a steady rise in citation frequency and impact factors over the past decade, with annual growth rates of 4 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

The association attributes this upward trend to the implementation of the Science and Technology Journal Excellence Action Plan, launched in 2019. The initiative is designed to raise the global profile of Chinese journals through funding, resource support, personnel training and the piloting of journal clusters.

Staff qualifications in China's scientific journals have also improved. According to the Blue Book, about 81.07 percent of English-language journal staff members hold master's or doctoral degrees, compared with roughly 47.19 percent of workers at Chinese-language journals.

The report notes that English-language journals have seen an increase in both publications and academic impact. In 2022, the average number of papers published per English-language journal in China rose 3.27 percent to 101 papers. The citation frequency per journal also grew 10.37 percent year-on-year, while the average impact factor increased 15.83 percent.

However, the report also reveals a significant gap between the volume of Science Citation Index papers published by Chinese scholars globally and the number published in domestic SCI journals. In 2023, Chinese scholars contributed 728,700 SCI papers, or about one-third of the global total. Yet, only 33,400 papers were published in SCI journals in China, accounting for less than 5 percent of the global total.

The proportion of papers in China's SCI journals classified in the top 25 percent of their respective fields (Q1 category) has risen sharply, from 6.28 percent in 2014 to 65.7 percent in 2023, with more than 60 percent of Chinese journal papers now falling into this elite category.

Despite these gains, the report highlighted the disparities between Chinese- and English-language journals regarding academic quality. The 4,556 Chinese-language journals, which make up 87.43 percent of the total, continue to lag behind their English-language counterparts in terms of policy support, funding and academic resources.

Gao Fu, academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and editor-in-chief of the journals Science Bulletin and hLife, called for continued efforts to foster innovation, address bottlenecks in research, strengthen intellectual property protection and promote science communication to the public.

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