China surpasses US in contributions to top international journals

China now leads in academic papers published globally, surpassing the United States in 2022, according to a report

BEIJING:

China contributed nearly one-third of the academic papers published in the most influential international journals in 2022, marking the first time China surpassed the United States to secure the top position globally, according to a report released on Wednesday.

Among the 54,002 papers published last year in 159 journals with the highest impact factors in 178 disciplines, 16,349 were contributed by Chinese authors, according to the report released by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Roughly 27 percent of the nearly 350,000 high-quality publications featured in 371 international journals with high impact factors and citations saw their first authors hailing from Chinese institutions. These papers generated nearly 650,000 citations, with China ranking first in the world in both the number of papers published and the number of citations.

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In 2022, China secured the second position in terms of the number of academic papers and review articles published in 16 top journals that boasted an impact factor of more than 30 and generated over 100,000 citations, according to the report.

It aligns with the 2023 Nature Index published in June which revealed that in 2022, China surpassed the United States in terms of the proportion of papers published in top journals in the field of natural sciences.