A Study Of Internationalization Of Scientific Journals And The Development Of Chinese Scientific Journals

The scientific journal, one of the most important medium and platform for scientific communications, plays vital roles in leading and promoting the development of scientific research in a country. As more and more needs for international academic communications, and internationally severe competition for the international scholarly journals market after China joining the WTO, the problem of internationalization of scientific journals intrigues the wide attention by scientists, journal editors and journal supervisors.This paper involves with the meanings and characteristics of international journals, proposes international or international oriented development of journals, two different strategies, and analyzes the issues associated with the development of Chinese scientific journals.The paper, based on 265 international top journals selected from JCR 2001 databases, uses citation evaluation methods in bibliometrics, to analyze the qualitative characteristics of these journals, in impact factors(IF), total cites, number of references, the national distribution of authors and users, et al.Combined quantitative with qualitative analysis, the paper describes what constitutes an international scientific journal, and the following main features of an international scientific journal are defined and discussed: international information communications, international members of the editorial board, normative editing procedures, international language (English) used, international markets, as well as the scale marketing of journals.Meanwhile, the paper discusses the fundamentals to be an international journal, and outlines the conditions that a scientific journal to be an international journal, from the perspectives of the level of research, the scale of scientific community, editor's sensitivity to information, information technology application and the marketing administration.In author's opinion, international or international oriented development are two different concepts. Considering the current conditions of Chinese science development and scientific journals, the international oriented development strategy is the best choice for most Chinese scientific journals, except that a few journals with high academic quality or good foundation make an international objectives and strategies. The author suggests that the reform of Chinese journals be based on journal administration, distribution channels, marketing, and networking.13 diagrams, 31 tables and 3 appendices are included.