Standing on the shoulders of Chinese giants? : a study on international biases in the process of global scientific knowledge diffusion

Abstract

Recent research has shown rapid growth in the number of Chinese-authored publications over the last decade. However, while the volume of publications has increased dramatically, the total number of citations - a popular measure of quality or impact - to such articles has risen at a decidedly slower pace. Three possibilities might explain the cause of this slow growth in citations. First, it could be that most Chinese-authored papers fall in the left-hand tail of the quality distribution. This is likely at least a partial explanation for the lag in quality. However, we believe that other factors also contribute to the quality gap. A second explanation for the citation lag is that Chinese scientists, while prolific, are simply not publishing in the most popular fields or in the most cited journals. If true, this scenario would exemplify a long-argued shortcoming of citation metrics and provide evidence supporting the policies and progress of Chinese science. A third possibility is that there exists a bias against Chinese science and Chinese-authored papers are undervalued and underutilized. To explore these possibilities, we collected citation and other key data on scientific publications from the highly prestigious and rigorously screened Nature and Nature-derivative (which we will refer to as Nature X) journals. In addition to conditioning out publication quality, we employ coarsened exact matching (CEM) to match Chinese-authored articles with similar US-authored articles before estimating the effect of Chinese-authorship on citations received. Our results suggest that a bias does exist against Chinese-authorship. While this paper identifies the existence of a citation gap, it does not attempt to identify the source of this citation gap. Thus, future research could focus on uncovering the exact mechanisms by which this phenomenon occurs. Doing so will no doubt inform policy and institutional practices to the benefit of scientific progress and, ultimately, societal welfare.