CHINA’S JOURNALS EMBRACE ENGLISH: Number and influence of English-language CHEMISTRY PUBLICATIONS from China climb

CHINA’S increasingly high-powered research is beginning to be matched by its English-language journals, which are growing in both numbers and international prominence. R&D spending in China shot from $10.8 billion in 2000 to $66.5 billion in 2008, according to “UNESCO Science Report 2010.” The number of scientists and engineers in the country more than doubled over the same period, to 1.59 million. Generally, these scientists must publish a certain number of papers to graduate with a Ph.D., get a job in academia, and be promoted. Many Chinese universities further specify that qualifying papers must be published in journals that meet the quality standards for indexing in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and thus earn an annual impact factors that can be used to compare how often competing journals are cited. Some universities even peg bonuses to the impact factors of the journals a scientist publishes in. This combination of funding and pressure has brought ...