China
East meets West as research grows
In the first of a two-part look at publishing in China, Siân Harris asks people involved in research and in supplying research content in China about the challenges for finding out and communicating research results
Over the past 10 to 15 years there has been a dramatic rise in the number of papers coming out of China. According to figures from ISI, China’s annual output now exceeds Japan and the UK and is second only to the USA. In the mid-1990s, China only published
about 10,000 papers a year in journals indexed by ISI and only a handful of papers were high-citation papers (with over 20 cites). Now, as David Swinbanks of Nature Publishing Group pointed out, well over 100,000 papers come from China each year and about 2,000 of these are high-citation papers. And China is already fifth on the list of most frequently-cited source countries. As Hubertus Riedesel, executive
vice-president of physical sciences and engineering at Springer, observed, ‘China has been catching up in higher education development and R&D funding. As a result, the demand for quality scientific publishing has increased. China’s ranking in global academic output is constantly improving and today it is considered to be among the top five producers of academic papers.’
14 Research Information August/September 2010
These impressive figures have inevitably
sparked considerable interest from Western publishers over recent decades and there has been a steady stream of Western businesses signing up with representatives on the ground or setting up their own offices. One of the latest publishers to do this is the American Institute of Physics (AIP), which launched an office in Beijing in March. As Mark Cassar, publisher of journals and technical publications at AIP, explained, ‘Physics is an international activity. People just happen to live in different countries. But given its rapid growth in recent years, when we try to mirror the international spread of our authors in our
reviewer pool and editorial boards, China takes on an increasingly significant role, so this was an obvious choice for our first international office.’ There are many different experiences
and perspectives on Chinese research, and the challenges and opportunities of disseminating this research. In the first of a two-part focus on China, we ask different people about their experiences of Chinese research and information access. Look out in the October/November issue of Research Information for insight into the challenges and opportunities for Western and Chinese publishers in China.
www.researchinformation.info
Main image: Chris Rogers, twilightproductions/istockphoto
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