Science magazine: ‘China looks to purge academia of “trash journals”’

Twelve years ago, reports an article in the 21 October issue of Science , “the highest impact factor of any Chinese journal was 0.5,” but now “China’s top indexed journal, Cell Research, has an impact factor of 9.4.” The article also reports, however, that “the country’s 4700 scientific periodicals include a hefty number of what the Chinese press refers to as ‘trash journals.’” From 2006 to 2010, only the US published more scientific papers than China, but China nevertheless ranked behind 19 other countries in citations per article. Now China’s General Administration of Press and Publication “has begun rolling out a series of reforms aimed at boosting the prestige of Chinese publishing.” Money is being spent to boost the better publications, and weak ones are closing or being closed.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.