The Relevance of National Journals from a Chinese Perspective

Abstract

The process of of journal evaluation began in the 1930s when the famous British scholar S.C. Bradford published his study of geophysics and lubrication, which presented the empirical law now known as Bradford's law of scattering, as well as the concept of core area journals. The citation indicator system and citation analysis theory system were founded in the middle of the twentieth century, and now have extensive influence. In the 1960s, Garfield carried out a large-scale statistical analysis of citations in journal literature. Generally speaking, the journal evaluation system has been gradually improved over time, producing an evaluation result that meets the development needs of science and technology. As one of the countries producing important science and technology outputs, China has ranked second according to the statistics of the number of scientific articles in recent years. At the same time, China has over 5000 scholarly journals, however, only 4% of them have been indexed in Web of Science and 10% of them in Scopus. A similar situation is found in Russia, Japan, Korea, and other non-English-speaking countries. Therefore, China has a lot of research and practice in the field of journal evaluation with which to explore more applicable and effective ways of assessing and improving national academic journal development. We will review the development situation of scientific, technical and medical ( ) journals in China to understand the demand for a national journal evaluation system. According to the comparative study on international and national evaluation systems and indicators of academic journals in China, we can find the characteristics of national journal evaluation under a framework of their respective evaluation purposes, evaluation methods, key features, and evaluation criteria. We introduce two cases of China's STM journal research and evaluation work: the development of the boom index and its monitoring function, and the definition and application of comprehensive performance scores ( s) for Chinese scientific and technical journals. English-language science and technology journals in China are more similar to international journals but are developing along a particular path. Therefore we also introduce three other cases: statistics and analysis of English-language science and technology journals in China, the communication value of Chinese-published English-language academic journals according to citation analysis, and the atomic structure model for evaluating English-language scientific journals published in non-English countries.