Comparative Study On The International Performance Of Chinese Academic Journals In Key Areas

As an important carrier of scientific and technological achievements,academic journals play an irreplaceable role in the dissemination and exchange of scientific and technological knowledge.Chinese government has issued a number of supporting policies or measures to solve the problem that the development of scientific and technological journals is not synchronized with the progress of scientific research progress.The "Excellence Action Plan for Chinese Science and Technology Journals" implemented in 2019 is a systematic integration and reconstruction of the previous plans,which has attracted wide attention.A study of the international performance of the journals selected for the Action Plan before and after their selection will help to identify strengths and weaknesses,improve the journal funding program,and improve the quality of journals.Based on the Web of Science database,the current study selects the category of "Leading Journals" in the "Excellence Action Plan" and applies bibliometric methods to conduct case studies in addition to overall comparison.At the overall level,the number of papers published in China’s leading journals has increased significantly.The impact measured by the indicator Journal Citation Index(JCI)has increased significantly,and the raise is greater after receiving the funding.The gap with the top international journals has been narrowed,but the ratios and cited share of international cooperated papers in China’s leading journals have declined compared with those of the top international journals.In the case study,comparison is done between three categories of journals –Leading Journals,domestic journals not "Excellence Action Plan"(i.e.,domestic comparable journals),and top international journals in the fields of materials science,engineering and multidisciplinary science from the aspects of journal profile,output characteristics and citation impact.In terms of management,all the sample Chinese journals adopt the mode of "part-time editors".Chinese scholars account for a relatively high proportion in the editorial board.Top international journals adopt the mode of either "part-time editors" or "full-time editors".The academic performance of the main editorial board members of the leading journals is better than that of both domestic comparable journals and international top journals.In terms of output characteristics,the improvement of international cooperation ratio and participation share of foreign major article source countries of the leading journals is lower than that of both domestic comparable journals and international top journals in the context of increased number of papers.The share of papers published by domestic authors in Chinese journals is much higher than that in the international top journals,which implies low attraction to foreign authors.In terms of citation impact,field variation exists.In order to further explore the core citation environment of journals in the international academic community,this paper applies social network analysis to construct the core citation network(including citating network and cited network),analyzes the network composition of the case journals and their positions in their networks,and measures the quality of core citation network journals of the case journals and the quality of journals of the strongest citation relationship.In different analytical dimensions,the performance of the case journals has both commonalities and field variations.Based on the research findings,this paper puts forward some suggestions on the development and improvement of Chinese academic journals.