Abstract
Abstract Journal evaluation systems reflect how new insights are critically reviewed and published, and the prestige and impact of a discipline’s journals is a key metric in many research assessment, performance evaluation, and funding systems. With the expansion of China’s research and innovation systems and its rise as a major contributor to global innovation, journal evaluation has become an especially important issue. In this paper, we first describe the history and background of journal evaluation in China and then systematically introduce and compare the most currently influential journal lists and indexing services. These are the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), the Journal Partition Table (JPT), the AMI Comprehensive Evaluation Report (AMI), the Chinese S&T Journal Citation Report (CJCR), “A Guide to the Core Journals of China” (GCJC), the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI), and the World Academic Journal Clout Index (WAJCI). Some other influential lists produced by government agencies, professional associations, and universities are also briefly introduced. Through the lens of these systems, we provide comprehensive coverage of the tradition and landscape of the journal evaluation system in China and the methods and practices of journal evaluation in China with some comparisons to how other countries assess and rank journals.
Highlights
China is among the many countries where the career prospects of researchers, in part, depend on the journals in which they publish
Definition Calculated by dividing the number of citations to the journal from other journals in the 6th year by the number of articles published in that journal in the previous 5 years
Taking 10 years as the statistical window, the hot index is defined as the ratio of the number of highly cited papers published by the journal to the total number of highly cited papers in the given discipline the journal belongs to
Summary
China is among the many countries where the career prospects of researchers, in part, depend on the journals in which they publish. The CSCD was established in 1989 by the National Science Library of CAS, with the aim of disseminating excellent scientific research achievements in China and helping scientists to discover information This database covers more than 1,000 of the top academic journals in the areas of engineering, medicine, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the life and earth sciences, agricultural science, industrial technology, the environmental sciences, and so on (National Science Library of CAS, 2019b). In 2007, these research areas were expanded to include the JCR categories, and, since 2012, the entire list has been published online to meet the growing number of retrieval requests This list provides reference data for administrators and researchers to evaluate the influence of international academic journals, and is widely recognized by many research institutions as a metric in their cash reward policies (Quan, Chen, & Shu, 2017). The guide is used by library intelligence departments as an informational reference to purchase and reserve books, and to help tutors develop reading lists (Committee for A Guide to the Core Journals of China, 2018)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
