Chinese Research Not Taken As Seriously As Papers From Elsewhere

2025-05-08 07:03:06

(MENAFN- Asia Times) My new research suggests there is a stubborn pattern in academic publishing. My co-author and I examined some 8,000 articles published in the world's most reputable economics journals to study citations, which are where academics cite previously published research in their papers. We found that papers whose lead authors had Chinese surnames received on average 14% fewer citations than comparable papers lead-written by those with non-Chinese names.

This supports similar findings from previous studies in chemistry and other natural sciences , suggesting that citation prejudice is a cross-disciplinary problem.

In reaching that conclusion, we put our raw findings through every test we could think of to rule out other explanations. Our first thought was that maybe Chinese-authored papers are more recently published on average than non-Chinese-authored papers, and therefore less cited. However the same citation gap holds for papers published in all years.

Another obvious guess is that Chinese-authored papers are of lower quality. Some readers will have heard about the issue of China's“paper mills,” companies that have in recent years been churning out research papers based on fraudulent findings for Chinese universities. There are reports that this may have made some Western academics more reluctant to take Chinese research seriously, but these are largely a problem for low-quality journals.

We only looked at articles published in the top journals (rated as 4 or 4* in the ABS journal rankings ). Each paper has gone through a strict process of editorial review, often taking a couple of years, so they are far less likely to have been produced by high-volume paper mills. Additionally, almost half of the Chinese authors in our sample were affiliated outside China, so paper-mill allegations against Chinese authors are not relevant in our observations.

MENAFN08052025000159011032ID1109526362

Legal Disclaimer:
MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the provider above.