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China’s scholarship shows atypical referencing patterns

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Abstract

China has greatly increased the number of published works indexed in the Web of Science since 1980. This corpus of scholarship allows analysis of the creativity or innovation of that contribution, where creativity is indicated by deep conventionality and high novelty. A test is applied to analyze reference pairs in articles to search for unexpected referencing combinations at the journal–journal level. The method has shown that atypical reference pairs occur in more highly cited articles. Using articles with at least one Chinese address as indexed in Web of Science for the publication year 2007, we tagged articles based on the conventionality and novelty of the reference pairs, seeking, in particular, those articles that reveal atypicality. This atypical set of articles represented 8% of all Chinese articles, compared to the world level of 7% in 2005. China’s atypical work is also more highly cited than a similar set of records at the world level for the years 1980–2000. The findings suggest that China has advanced in its goals of establishing itself as a full participant in global science and technology.

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Notes

  1. Possible explanations are offered in the referenced article. The most likely explanation is due to the higher reputation of international collaborators and the fact that they may be more conservative in approach.

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Funding

Xiaojing Cai would like to acknowledge the support from Fulbright Foreign Student Program, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant number: 71843012) and the major basic theoretical research project of Zhejiang University (Grant number 16ZDJC003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Caroline S. Wagner & Xiaojing Cai

  2. School of Public Affairs, Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China

    Xiaojing Cai

  3. Department of Operations Management, Quantitative Methods and Information Systems, Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur, India

    Satyam Mukherjee

Authors
  1. Caroline S. Wagner
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  2. Xiaojing Cai
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  3. Satyam Mukherjee
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Contributions

CW: Concept, writing; XC: Data analysis and visualization; SM: methodology and data analysis.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Caroline S. Wagner.

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The author(s) declare that they have no competing interests.

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Wagner, C.S., Cai, X. & Mukherjee, S. China’s scholarship shows atypical referencing patterns. Scientometrics 124, 2457–2468 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03579-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03579-2

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