| More than thirty years after the Reform and Opening up,China's economic and social development has made great strides.With the establishment of independent innovation strategy,and in order to achieve the 2020 target of construction an innovative country,China has adopted a series of measures such as optimizing talent training model,increasing investment in science and technology and science and technology system reform.Scientific research is an important support of the effective implementation of independent innovation strategy as well as the construction of an innovative country.Real-time and comprehensive scientific studies on the current situation of China's academic research will help to grasp the status quo and shortcomings of China's scientific research.It will also benefit the formulation of science and technology policy and contribute to the building of an innovative country.Multi methods in scientometrics,text mining,data visualization,and regression analysis are applied to Web of Science's three journal citation indexes SCIE /SSCI /A&HCI and Essential Science Indicators database of Thomson Reuters.Comprehensive evaluation of the status quo,dynamics and relevant characteristics of China's basic scientific research,social science research and excellent research outputs will be conducted.The research can be divided into five aspects:(1)the academic focus on China;(2)the development of China's basic scientific research and associated features;(3)the development of China's social science research and associated features;(4)the status quo,dynamics and relevant features of China and world total excellent research outputs;and(5)the impact of funding and international collaboration to the quality of China's excellent research.The main conclusions of this study are listed as following:China has attracted more and more attention from worldwide scholars,a large number of overseas Chinese facilitate the worldwide studies focusing on China.Although an increasingly diverse profile of participants,the massive rise of research focusing on China is mainly limited to some geographically proximate neighbors of China and some affluent regions.The research foci of worldwide China-related studies is not limited to “Area studies”,but covers almost all the natural sciences and social sciences disciplines.Recently,with the rising of China's economy and the problems appearing along with the social development,academics began to focus on Chinarelated environmental issues,public health and economic issues.China's basic scientific research publications maintain a rapid growth trend.China has ranked as the second largest SCIE paper contributor only after the United States since 2006.However,China's basic scientific research outputs are unevenly distributed among fields,and Chinese scholars in human health-related disciplines are relatively not active in publishing.The quality and impact of China's SCIE papers are generally low.The funding reporting rate of China's SCIE papers is significantly higher than the global average which indicates the basic research in China is well-funded.China has also made great progress in recent decades in publishing social sciences research papers in international journals.Especially in recent years,the publication volume has grown rapidly.However,the global share of China's SSCI papers is still low,but also much lower than China's global share of her SCIE papers.China's SSCI papers are highly skewed at both regional and institutional levels and also unevenly distributed among fields which mainly distributed in economics and management related disciplines.In addition,China still lacks the Olympic players in social sciences research who has great international academic influence.Besides,the high-quality and SSCI indexed social sciences journals are also limited in China.Regarding scientific excellence,China lags behind the United States and the European Union,but China has successfully integrated into the global excellent research collaboration network.International cooperation plays an important role in global excellent research.Cooperation between China and the United States and the EU-15 help to improve the quality of China's excellent research outputs,but the quality enhancing function is slowly shrinking.The main contribution of this paper are as following:This paper provides an updated and comprehensive evaluation of China's natural science research,social sciences research and excellent research.It enriches the empirical study of international scientific and technical cooperation to enhance the quality of scientific research.This research will serve as a reference for the development of relevant science and technology policy.The theories and methods of bibliometric,text mining and other disciplines are applied to academic research field of China-related research.It answers a series of questions that government and academia highly interested in.Such as “who is interested in China” and “what aspects are they interested in?”This paper optimizes the funding acknowledgment search algorithm in the Web of Science database.This paper finds and empirically validates three serious coverage limitations of Web of Science's funding acknowledgment which have been neglected by academia: citation index database bias,language bias,and acknowledgment type bias.This finding will contribute important cautions for future research using this data source.This study has developed two methods to identify whether an article is Chinarelated topic and whether an author is Chinese in ethnicity.The contribution of these two methods can provide a reference for future related studies. |
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