Present Situation And Developing Strategies Of Agricultural Journals Published In China

In order to study the publishing situation of Chinese agricultural journals (CAJ), we collected 8 items of basic information about 827 CAJ in the mainland of China. The main results are as follows: (1) Disciplinary distribution of CAJ has been relatively steady since 1995. That is, the number of CAJ in every disciplinary changed small in different periods. (2) About 92% of CAJ are published monthly, bimonthly and quarterly. The number of quarterly published CAJ has been declined greatly, while that of monthly published increased significantly since 1995. (3) About 80% of CAJ are established from 1970 to 1999, and the number peak of newly launched journals occurs in the period 1980-1989. (4) The regional distribution of CAJ in the mainland of China has been almost the same since 1995. And the number distribution positively relates to the level of economical and cultural development of regions. (5) The number of technical journals is the most, the academic is the next, and the popular science is the least. Considering China being the largest agricultural population in the world, the number of the popular science CAJ is relatively deficiency. (6) The distribution of responsible institutions follows the order of local government (37.1%) >state government (29.0%) >research institute (17.4%) >association (10.8%) >university (3.4%) >others (2.3%). And about 42% of CAJ are sponsored by national institutions, and 58% of them are sponsored by regional institutions. The percentage of the national sponsors was increased by 16% over the year 1995. (7) The characteristics of discipline, issues per year, start year, class and responsible institution of the 126 core journals of CAJ are also illustrated in this paper.To display the academic impact of CAJ, we analyzed 10 scientometric indexes and their distributions. The results show that: The 4 important indexes (total citations, impact factors, immediacy index and source items) of CAJ are lower than those of the average of all scientific journals published in the mainland of China. This may mean that the using frequencies of CAJ are relatively lower than those of other Chinese scientific journal. The average percentage of funded papers in CAJ is 58%, much higher than that of other Chinese scientific journals (38%). It indicates that Chinese government has been paying more attention to agricultural researches than to other fields.For clarification of the online academic impact of CAJ, we analyzed 4 online scientometric indexes and their distributions. And furthermore, we analyzed three online indexes of three journal groups of CAJ with different online publication extent, and also compared their indexes between OA journals and the others. The results indicate that: The average total download times of CAJ are 65% of the average of total journals;the web impact factor (7.359) and web immediacy index (6.234) of CAJ are much lower than those of the average of total journals (12.027 and 10.627). In order to enhance the online academic impact of CAJ, we proposed some feasible proposals to CAJ.Two Chinese leading agricultural journals (Acta Agronomica Sinica and Scientia Agricultura Sinicd) and three foreign relative journals (Theoretical and Applied Genetics, Plant Physiology and Crop Science) were comparatively analyzed on their basic factors. The results are as follows: (1) Among four restricting factors (the number of volume, the number of issue, the number of pages and the settingof column), two Chinese journals have three of them, but three foreign journals only have two of them. (2) The average period of peer review of Ada Agronomica Sinica is longer than those of two foreign journals, while the average paper publishing delay of two Chinese journals are not longer than those of two foreign journals. (3) The number of references and journal self-citation rate of two Chinese journals are much lower than those of three foreign journals. (4) Citation habits are different between Chinese journals and foreign journals, i.e. the foreign journals have relatively longer citation half life. (5) The number of country origin of authors and institutions are greatly different between two Chinese journals and three foreign journals. (6) Two Chinese journals have more to learn from three foreign journals on the utility of network. Based on these results, we proposed some editorial and publishing strategies for the two analyzed Chinese journals.For realizing the cited situation of Ada Agronomica Sinica (AAS), we analyzed the citation statistical data of AAS in the year 2003 derived from Chinese Academic Journals Comprehensive Citation Report. The results are as follows: (1) 205 papers that were cited more than 3 times in 2003 are defined to the important papers of AAS. (2) The distribution of regions and institutions of these papers are listed. (3) The distribution of research fields and crops of these papers are illustrated. (4) Two hot topics and six noteworthy themes in the field of crop science are found. (5) Seventy-eight authors whose papers were cited more than four times are the core authors of AAS. (6) The peak of cited frequency of AAS appears approximately in 10 years conversely counted from the year 2003. (7) The disciplinary distribution of 235 journals that cited AAS in 2003 is analyzed. (8) Fourteen papers that cited AAS more than 4 times in 2003 are review articles. (9) The institution origins of the authors whose paper cited AAS in 2003 are classified into 3 groups by the cited frequencies, i.e. the core group, the expanding group and the periphery group.AAS has been financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and China Association for Science and Technology since 1999. In order to inspect the financial supports, we analyzed the publishing situation of AAS from the year 2003 to 2005. The results show that: The total pages increased from 960 in 2003 to 1690 in 2005, and meanwhile the publishing delays were shortened about 2 month. Apart from the self-citation rate, other 10 scientometric indexes raised. All those mean that AAS made progresses on the aspects of academic level and internationalization in the period of 2003 to 2005. We also analyzed the topics and distribution of foundation related to papers published in AAS.