从“唯影响因子”到“重四维评价” 打造世界科技顶刊“中国标尺”From

Date: July 30, 2026 | Source: Science and Technology Daily

Reporters: Liu Yin, Dai Xiaopei, Cao Xiuying

For a long time, the world's leading scientific citation databases have been dominated by English-language journals. Non-English journals account for nearly half of all journals worldwide, yet less than 15% of them are indexed — meaning research published in non-English languages has long been "systematically invisible."

Reporters from Science and Technology Daily recently learned from the Chinese Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) that China's independently developed World Science Citation Database has completed cross-language integration of major Chinese, English, and Japanese journals, and will begin trial operation by the end of this year. China's independently constructed catalog of world-class science journals and its evaluation indicator system will also be officially unveiled next year.

Moving from "impact factor only" toward diversified evaluation, and from "going to sea on borrowed ships" toward "building our own ships and setting sail," the establishment of a fair, diversified, and distinctive evaluation system — and the creation of a "Chinese yardstick" for world-class science journals — marks that China's development of an independent journal evaluation system has entered a critical phase, and that Chinese science journals are accelerating their breakthrough toward world-class status.

Breaking Through: Escaping Evaluation Monopoly

Currently, the internationally recognized journal evaluation systems mainly include foreign databases such as SCI (Science Citation Index) and EI (Engineering Index, while widely accepted domestic core journal evaluation systems include CSCD (Chinese Science Citation Database) and CSSCI (Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index). Taking SCI as an example, it indexed 292 Chinese journals in 2025.

"In terms of indicator design and weight allocation, current mainstream international journal evaluation systems tend to favor the English-language context, which can easily allow academic standards of developing countries to be defined by the West," Yang Daiqing, Director of the Scientometrics and Evaluation Research Center at CISTI, told reporters. Building China's own evaluation indicator system for world-class science journals means using China's own "ruler" to measure the gap between domestic journals and international advanced levels.

Zhang Xin, Vice Chairman and Full-time Secretary-General of the Chinese Society of University Scientific Journals, acknowledged that in recent years, several major international journal indexing databases have frequently adjusted their rules and continuously raised entry thresholds. These adjustments are not targeted at China, but because the number of new Chinese journals has grown relatively fast, the impact has been particularly pronounced.

In 2024, China continued to rank first in the world in the number of papers published in the most influential journals across disciplines, the number and citation count of papers in high-level international journals, and the number of hot papers. Meanwhile, the Blue Book on the Development of Chinese Science Journals (2025) shows that in 2024, 88% of papers in Chinese SCI journals came from Chinese authors, but these accounted for only 4.2% of the total international papers published by Chinese scholars in the year. In other words, over 95% of Chinese scholars' SCI-indexed papers were published in overseas journals.

The data reveals a structural imbalance: China's "hard power" in scientific research ranks among the world's top, while the development of "soft power" in academic communication and journal evaluation lags relatively behind.

"China's research volume, paper output, and funding investment rank among the world's top, and it should have an independently controllable, globally oriented, and nation-serving academic exchange platform," said Liu Xiaomin, a research librarian at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Literature and Information Center. Facing the goal of building a science and technology powerhouse, breaking the Western single-evaluation framework and constructing China's own evaluation system has become an inevitable choice.

Establishing: Shaping a Four-Dimensional Logic

"We must accelerate the cultivation of world-class science journals, build internationally influential scientific literature and data platforms, initiate high-level international academic conferences, and encourage major basic research results to be first published and developed in Chinese journals and platforms." General Secretary Xi Jinping's important instructions have pointed the direction for the profound transformation of cultivating world-class science journals in China.

In fact, China has long been laying out and advancing the construction of an independent, scientific, and fair journal evaluation system. In 2019, multiple departments promoted the implementation of the "Action Plan for Excellence in Chinese Science Journals" to empower journals in key fields to improve quality and advance. In 2021, three departments including the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee issued a special document 明确 stating efforts to build a number of world-renowned journals representing the country's academic level...

The ongoing construction of the World Science Citation Database and the world-class science journal evaluation system is precisely the result of years of policy cultivation and reform accumulation.

"This indicator system will provide a Chinese solution for evaluating world-class science journals," Zhang Xin said. "It is not a closed 'self-loop'; it helps Chinese journals find their position in the global journal landscape and maintain their strategic focus."

"While retaining classic indicators such as impact factor and total citation frequency, the indicator system independently develops new indicators such as the 'publication index' to explore new evaluation pathways," Yang Daiqing believes. Using China's independently developed evaluation system, with a massive and compatible global multilingual journal literature as the "data foundation," to conduct multidimensional and scientific evaluation and grading of global journals will help enhance China's global academic discourse power.

The four dimensions — academic organizational capacity, academic leadership, academic influence, and social influence — each have their own emphasis while complementing one another, fully presenting the value chain of science journals and serving as the core elements of this indicator system.

"The real innovation lies in the top-level logic of this framework, namely, constructing the evaluation system from the social functions of journals," Liu Xiaomin said. "The four dimensions focus on what functions journals serve in the academic community and social development, rather than simply looking at citation data. This is the biggest feature that distinguishes China's journal evaluation system from Western bibliometric databases."

In Liu Xiaomin's view, the indicator system not only objectively benchmarks against century-old international renowned journals to identify gaps, but also showcases the strengths of high-quality domestic journals to build confidence. "Only by targeting efforts through evaluation can we steadily advance the construction of world-class science journals."

Implementing: Building an Open Ecosystem

"The new system is proactively connecting with international publishing groups such as Elsevier and Springer Nature, and collaborating with mainstream databases like Scopus to label Chinese-recognized first-class journals, so as to open up to the world with universal and fair evaluation standards, without deliberately favoring domestic journals," Yang Daiqing said. He hopes that scholars will pay attention to the catalog of first-class journals and publish outstanding work in domestic journals, helping Chinese science journals move toward world-class status.

"In the future, we hope to incorporate the construction of first-class journals into core evaluation scenarios such as professional title review and project application, and through incentive measures such as domestic publication incentives and expanded result recognition, guide high-quality results to flow back to domestic journals," Yang Daiqing explained. Administrative guidance is not mandatory intervention in free submission; it only sets usage specifications for research results supported by public funds, which is also a common practice in some countries internationally. At the same time, the state should support domestic science journals to improve quality and expand capacity, consolidating the core foundation for being selected into the first-class catalog.

Arnout Jacobs, President of Springer Nature Greater China, believes that a widely recognized standard can make the "rules of the game" clear and transparent. "China already has many domestic journals performing well in international rankings, and we are honored to co-publish more than 200 of them," Jacobs said. He also cautioned that the indicator system needs to guard against "prestige bias" while focusing more on journal quality and influence.

"The rise of journals is a long process. Within five years, we will mainly improve the domestic academic evaluation ecosystem; it will take more than ten years to gradually build international brand influence," Liu Xiaomin said. "The new system treats internal issues and observes externally. It does not seek short-term global acclaim, but long-term healthy growth."

Yang Daiqing also acknowledged that challenges such as optimizing the new indicator system, breaking through Western academic barriers, and cross-language intelligent measurement still need to be tackled, and gaining global mainstream recognition will take time. However, China's solid foundation of massive high-quality research manuscripts provides strong support for the new system to go international.

From breaking the Western-dominated status quo, to establishing standards and reshaping logic, to implementing and building an ecosystem, the construction path of China's science journal evaluation system is already clear. As the pace of "building our own ships and setting sail" becomes more solid, a new evaluation ecosystem rooted in China and oriented toward the world is accelerating its formation. This will not only help Chinese journals move from "following" to "running alongside" and even "leading," but also contribute a Chinese solution with both value and depth to the international academic community.