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China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations (CSTPC): History, impact
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Article  in  Scientometrics · August 2004

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Jointly published by Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest Scientometrics,
and Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht Vol. 60, No. 3 (2004) 385–397

China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations

(CSTPC): History, impact and outlook
YISHAN WU, YUNTAO PAN, YUHUA ZHANG, ZHENG MA, JINGAN PANG, HONG GUO,
BO XU, ZHIQING YANG

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), Beijing (P. R. China)

This paper traces the history of China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations database
(CSTPC) since its founding in 1988. The fact that most Chinese scientists publish their research
results in Chinese journals requires that China establish SCI counterparts dedicated to domestic
S & T journals. The article describes the selection criteria for source journals, the approach used to
adjust the structure of source journals, the criteria for selecting items to be included in the
database, and the indexing method. Then it discusses the impact upon government R & D
administration agencies and the science community in general by both CSTPC team and CSTPC
database. Finally, the article analyzes the main factors that lead to the primary success of CSTPD.
The authors encourages information workers in other non-English developing countries to build up
similar databases.

Introduction

SCI has been used as an evaluation tool in many countries and China is no
exception. However, although China takes about one fifth of the world population, and
China’s full-time equivalent R & D researchers are as many as 925,000 man-year in
2000,1 which ranks it as the third place in the world (with USA and Russia boasting
more R & D personnel), China’s share in world total of SCI papers has never passed
5%. Obviously, in order to appropriately evaluate research performance of Chinese
scientists, we have to build our own SCI equivalent. Institute of Scientific and
Technical Information of China (referred to as ISTIC henceforth), an institute under the
Ministry of Science and Technology of China, has done exactly that. In this paper, we
will reflect the history of China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database
(referred to as CSTPC henceforth), analyze its impact upon the publishing and
evaluation practice of the Chinese scientific community, and give an outlook about its
future development.

Received January 30, 2004

Address for correspondence:

YISHAN WU
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), 15 Fuxinglu
Beijing 100038, P. R. China
E-mail: [email protected]

0138–9130/2004/US $ 20.00
Copyright © 2004 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest
All rights reserved
Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

Historical background and description of CSTPC

As late as 1987, few Chinese knew how many papers were published by Chinese
scientists in the world and no one knew how many papers were published domestically.
In July of 1987, Mr. Son Jian, the then Minister of the State Science and Technology
Commission, which was renamed as the Ministry of Science and Technology in later
years, directed the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) to
carry out such a paper count. As a result, China Scientific and Technical Papers and
Citations (CSTPC), a database dedicated to the partial evaluation of research
performance of China’s scientists and engineers, initiated by ISTIC and sponsored by
the Ministry of Science and Technology (then the State Science and Technology
Commission) was born. It is based on representative domestic S & T journals. In 1988,
CSTPC covered 1,189 journals while in 2000, the source journals totaled 1,411.

How we selected the source journals?

An ISTIC research group was established in 1987. The group decided that any
candidate source journal for our database has to meet four basic requirements:
numerability, analyzability, availability and continuity. What is more, considering the
general biased distribution of articles and citations among all the journals, as was found
by Eugene Garfield, the group thought that they did not need cover all journals.
By the end of 1988, there were totally 3052 S & T journals as registered in the State
General Administration for Press and Publication. In order to select the most
representative ones as the source journal of CSTPC, ISTIC did the following work:
– identify all the journals already registered by internationally influenced abstract
and index services, such as SCI, EI (Engineering Index), CA (Chemical
Abstracts), SA (Science Abstracts, UK), Referativniy Zhurnal (produced in the
former Soviet Union), and the Current Bibliography on Science and Technology
(produced in Japan);
– collect the data on core Chinese journals as analyzed by some Chinese
information experts, such as 104 journal titles recognized as core journals in
natural sciences by Qinsu Jing of Lanzhou University, who built up a prototype
of Chinese equivalent of SCI but soon gave up;2
– collect all the major science abstracts, such as “China Physics Abstracts”, “China
Mathematics Abstracts”, and “China Abstracts on Mechanical Engineering, and
see what journals were used by them;
– identify all the journals produced by national science societies;
– ask experts of different disciplines to identify most important journals in their
specific fields.

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 Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

Based on the above work, 1189 journals were chosen as the first batch of source
journals, in which the shares occupied by basic science, engineering and technology,
medicine, as well as agriculture are close to the corresponding shares in the total 3052
journals. See Table 1 and Table 2.

Table 1. Distribution of Chinese S & T journals by subjects, 1988

Subject category Journal titles Share of all journals (%)
Engineering and technology 1286 42
Medicine and health 490 16
Agriculture and forestry 394 13
Total journal titles for all subjects 3052

Source: Internal database of the State General Administration for Press and Publication, 1988

Table 2. Distribution of source journals in SCTPC by subjects, 19883

Subject category Journal titles Share of all journals (%)
Basic sciences 275 23.5
Engineering and technology 560 47.7
Medicine and health 193 16.2
Agriculture and forestry 129 10.8
Total journal titles for all subjects 1189

Source: ISTIC, CSTPC

How do we adjust the structure of source journals?

Since the initial selection of source journals in 1988, they were fine-tuned each year,
with new titles added and relatively poor ones phased out. China’s S & T journals have
witnessed great development since 1988. By the end of 2001, there had been about 4600
titles of S & T journals, among them many are about new and emerging disciplines,
making the adjustment of source journals necessary. In making adjustment decisions,
we ask ourselves several questions:
– Are articles in a new journal of high quality? We could rely on subject specialists
to answer this question.
– Does the candidate journals follow established editing norm? For instance, is the
bibliographic information complete? Do manuscripts receive peer review before
they are accepted?
– Does the candidate journal have high impact? For instance, is its circulation big
or small? Can it manage to attract famous scientists as its contributors?
– Does it have certain international visibility? Was it already registered by
internationally influenced abstract and index services? Does the membership of
its editorial board contain any internationally renowned scientists?
– Is the disciplinary and geographical representation reasonable enough? On the
one hand, we give priority to journals in emerging and interdisciplinary fields. On

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Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

the other hand, we need to cover reasonable amount of journals produced in less
developed provinces.
– Are relevant indicators of the current source journals satisfying enough? For each
journal, we calculated its total citations, impact factor, immediacy index,
proportion of papers funded by major science foundations, proportion of overseas
authors, average citations of each cited paper, etc. If a journal performs very poor
in terms of above indicators, we get rid of it from source journals.
In 2000, after adjustment, 1411 domestic journals (including 25 journals in English
language) are selected as the source journals of CSTPC. It is safe to say that all the
major journals in various disciplines have been covered.

How do we select papers to be counted?

Unlike SCI, which counts all kinds of literature in a journal as long as it is accepted
as source journal, we manually select papers to be processed into the database from all
stuff in a given journal. The basic rules are as follows:
– For academic journals, all the “scientific articles” and “research letters” are
selected.
– For engineering and technology journals, items to be selected are “scientific
articles” and papers that explain new technology, new materials, new process and
new products.
– For medical journals, items to be selected are theoretical papers, major summary
report on clinical experience and substantial review articles.
No matter what kinds of journals, items such as lectures, abstracts for conference
papers, speeches or pieces of practical know-how would be excluded. We hope that
through such strict selection, the database would become better evaluation tools.

How do we index a paper?

Each paper is normally attributed to a single organization as indicated by the author.

If more than one corporate addresses appear in a paper, the first address is used to
attribute the paper. In the case of author working in hospitals affiliated to a university,
the relevant paper would be attributed to both university category and hospital category,
so that ranking of universities and hospitals would be possible. This paper will be
counted only once despite being doubly attributed. Subject classification for each paper
is done manually according to “the Discipline Classification and Code” issued by the
State Quality and Technology Supervision Bureau. For every paper, our workers will
ask the following questions and give corresponding codes depending on the answer:
Whether is it resulted from a project funded by the National Natural Science Foundation

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 Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

of China or other major foundations? Whether is it contributed by overseas authors?

Are co-authored papers resulted from international cooperation, inter-provincial
cooperation, cooperation between researchers in different institutes in the same
province, or between researchers in the same institutes? etc. In some years, we also
code such information as the time lag between a manuscript was accepted and the
journal was issued, the age, gender, and professional title of the first author, etc.
Anyway, our indexing scope is wider than SCI.

Impacts and applications

What impact has CSTPC team made upon China’s science community?

CSTPD team not only builds and maintains this database, but also collects
publication statistics about Chinese scientists through SCI, EI, ISTP, etc.. CSTPC team
had exerted the enormous impact upon China’s scientific community through its annual
press release (first of the press conference was held in 1990) of various rankings of
universities, research institutes, companies and hospitals based on CSTPC statistics and
the statistics produced by ISI and further processed by ISTIC, through its data and
analysis service to some important organizations, such as the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (NSFC), Ministry of Education and the China Association for
Science and Technology (CAST), and through its close connection with editorial boards
of many S & T journals.
Prompted by our open ranking of universities and research institutes, more and more
organizations introduced incentives to encourage scientists to publish more papers in
influential journals. China S & T Statistical Yearbook, published by the State Statistics
Bureau, formally adopt the publication figures provided by CSTPC as the official
figure. Some university presidents or other university officials remarked once and again
that “CSTPC team functions as a baton in a commander’s hand. We will move to any
direction where your baton points”. To be specific, through CSTPC team’s constant
promotion and evaluation, more and more scientists in China have been increasingly
aware of the importance to publish in international journals as well as in major domestic
journals so as to enhance effective scholarly exchange and establish themselves among
the community. As a result, their paper productivity has been improved a great deal. In
1987, China produced 4,880 SCI papers. In 2000, 30,499 papers were recorded by SCI,
forming a more than 5-fold jump over 14 years. In 1988, CSTPC recorded 85,750
papers while in 2000, the corresponding figure is 180,848, which is more than two
times of the figure 12 years ago. Tables 3 through 5 and Figure 1 show the increasing
trend of China’s SCI papers.

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Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

Table 3. Growth trend of SCI papers by Chinese scientists

Unit: Piece
Year 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

China 6630 6224 9617 10411 13134 14459 16883 19838 24476 30499

World total 619972 679695 752241 790638 853822 890941 916434 930479 973286 967663

Source: ISI, cleaned by CSTPC team

Table 4. Growth rate of China’s SCI papers

against that of the World Total,
1991–2000

Growth rate of China over a decade % 360.0

Growth rate of world total over a decade % 56.1

Source: ISI, cleaned by CSTPC team

Table 5. Growth trend of citations to papers by Chinese scientists

Growth rate over
Year 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 a decade

Cited papers 3608 5994 7060 7180 7869 8826 9952 11549 13024 15733 336%

Total citations 6771 11384 12896 12626 14000 15800 18434 21511 25173 31384 363.5%
Source: ISI, cleaned by CSTPC team

Figure 1. Growth trend of China’s SCI papers

Source: ISI, cleaned by CSTPC team

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 Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

What impact has been produced by CSTPC database?

At first, CSTPC team only counted the number of papers through a simple database,
and made relevant analysis. In 1994, the original database was transformed into a
relational citation database. Since then, its application in various organizations has been
increasing and its impact more visible. Table 7, Figures 2 and 3 summarize some basic
statistics as derived from CSTPC.

Table 6. Growth trend of CSTPC papers

Unit: Piece
1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Papers 94434 98966 101983 107492 107991 116239 120851 133341 162779 180848

Source: ISTIC, CSTPC

Table 7. Growth trend of citations received by CSTPC papers

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
Citations 100748 104758 172385 280476 335314 466611 554324

Source: ISTIC, CSTPC

In 2001, all the papers in CSTPC cited a total of 535,291 references, including
journal articles, monographs, reports, conference proceedings, theses and dissertations,
patents, industrial standards, etc. The distribution of these document types are shown in
Figure 2.4

Figure 2. Distribution of document types of references as recorded in CSTPC

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Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

In the past, many Chinese journals did not give enough page space for references in
order to cut cost. Some editorial boards even recommend to contributors or demanded
that the number of references should be less than a given number, and some went so far
as to delete the reference list given by the authors and indicated that “References here
have been deleted by the editor”. Through the wider and wider influence of CSTPC,
being selected as the source journal of CSTPC has become a great honor. Those journal
producers who belittled references in the past gradually realize that if they do not
publish complete references as it should, they will have no hope of being selected as the
source journal, or excluded from the new source journal list. Therefore, the average
number of references per paper in Chinese journals have been increasing in recent
years, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Increasing trend of the number of references per paper, 1995–2000

Source: ISI, cleaned by CSTPC team

As China’s status of science and technology in the world and the average quality of
Chinese journals get improved, more and more overseas scientists start collaborating
with Chinese counterparts and they publish their solely-authored co-authored papers in
Chinese journals. Table 8 indicates the distribution of countries or regions whose
scientists coauthored with Chinese scientists in 2000.

What applications have been made of CSTPC?

(1) Editing of Chinese S & T Journal Citation Report. Based on the database,
CSTPC group published its first Chinese S & T Journal Citation Report in 1996. It is
warmly welcomed by journal producers as well as journal administration agencies.

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 Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

Table 9 and Table 10 are some statistics derived from our Chinese S & T Journal
Citation Report series.

Table 8. Distribution of countries or regions whose scientists coauthored with Chinese scientists
as first authors, 2000
Number of joint papers with Number of joint papers with
Country or region Chinese scientists as first author Country or region Chinese scientists as first author
USA 587 Sweden 27
Japan 566 Belgium 19
Hong Kong 339 Denmark 19
Germany 183 Italy 19
UK 133 Switzerland 17
Australia 94 Finland 13
France 79 New Zealand 11
Canada 74 Poland 11
Singapore 48 Spain 9
Korea 44 Austria 7
Russia 33 Israel 7
Taiwan, China 32 Norway 6
The Netherlands 30 India 5
Source: ISTIC, CSTPC

Table 9. Total citations received by CSTPC source journals in 2000

Total citations 2000
T Journal titles Share of total (%)
T>1000 25 1.77
500<T 1000 90 6.38
200<T 500 297 21.05
100<T 200 345 24.45
50<T 100 299 21.19
T 50 355 25.16
Source: ISTIC, CSTPC

Table 10. Impact Factors (IMP) of CSTPC source journals

1999 2000
IMP Journal titles Share of total Journal titles Share of total
(%) (%)
IMP>1 7 0.51 20 1.42
0.5<IMP 1 97 7.07 108 7.65
0.1<IMP 0.5 838 61.08 887 62.86
0.05<IMP 0.1 274 19.97 238 16.87
0.01<IMP 0.05 137 9.99 123 8.72
IMP 0.05 19 1.38 13 0.92
Source: ISTIC, CSTPC

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Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

(2) Use of CSPTC data in various evaluations. Due to the data reliability and full
coverage of source journals, CSTPC data have been used in a lot of decisions made by
government agencies or non-government associations. The following applications are
just a few examples:
• Evaluation Framework for the first batch of projects supported by the National
Development Plan for Major Basic Research Fields, Ministry of Science and
Technology;
• International position of China in various disciplines, a project conducted by
CSTPC team and commissioned by China National Natural Science Foundation
of China (NSFC);
• Decision on which journals should be granted with the special funds established
by China Association of Science and Technology (CAST);
• Decision on which journals should be granted with the “Excellent S & T
Journals Funds”, which is maintained by China National Natural Science
Foundation of China (NSFC);
• The Second National Journal Award, which is jointly organized by the State
General Administration for Press and Publication and Ministry of Science and
Technology.
(3) Use of CSTPC data in policy recommendations. During the so-called Cultural
Revolution from 1966 to 1976, all colleges and universities were cancelled. As a result,
there existed a “low valley” in terms of publication amount of scientists aged 40-50 in
the early 1990s, as can be seen in Figure 4. CSTPC team published a report in 1994 to
alert the government about the urgency to accelerate the training of young scientists.5
The report was well received by the science community. After about 5 years of efforts
by both government and the scientific community, the “age gap crisis” was ameliorated
to some extent, as our statistics shows. Scientists in their early thirties become the most
productive group. We note that phenomenon has also been discussed by Jin et al.6

Prospects

Since China’s accession to WTO, the Chinese government will gradually loosen its
control in many areas and only focus on those areas where government should bear
main responsibility. Therefore, the Ministry of Science and Technology is now not
willing to associate itself with the ranking of institutes according to paper productivity
and citations. ISTIC will continue to release such ranking data, however, since they are
welcomed by the public. In addition, CSTPC team has built a new database consisting
of 112 English S & T journals published by Chinese organizations. At present there are
196 English S & T journals in China and those 112 titles cover almost all the academic
journals. It is our belief that since English has been de facto international language in

394 Scientometrics 60 (2004)

 Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

science community, English journals will play increasingly significant role in

facilitating scholarly exchange between Chinese and foreign scientists. A dedicated
database will help accumulate useful data and guide relevant journals to improve their
quality. In early August 2003, ISTIC released first batch of data drawn from this new
database and the released results were widely reported in China’s mass media. We
found that English S & T journals publish much more internationally coauthored papers
than average Chinese language S & T journals. They also publish more papers
supported by various science foundations, which means possibly higher quality papers,
since those research projects reported in the papers had been peer reviewed once before
they secured research grants from the foundations.8 When we collect sufficient data on
the quality of domestic English S & T journals, we will try to recommend some of the
best English journals to major international abstract and index services. In the mean
time, Wanfang Data Company, a specialized database company with its majority of
shares held by ISTIC, is promoting the sale of CSTPC through various approaches. The
income will help improve the financial status of CSTPC team. We are very optimistic
about the future of CSTPC.

Figure 4. Age distribution versus productivity of Chinese scientists, 1991 and 1996
Source: ISTIC, CSTPC
X: Age of authors; Y: Share of papers produced by scientists at certain age in total, in percentage

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Y. WU et al.: CSTPC: History, impact and outlook

Discussion

When ISTIC researchers began counting China’s S & T papers, no one expected that
CSTPC team and CSTPC database would become so popular. At present, the members
of CSTPC team are often invited to give lectures in different occasions. The CSTPC
database are consulted so frequently that sometimes the daily work of the group is
disrupted. Why is it so?
First, SCI of ISI set an example before us so CSTPC team always know that their
hard work would get rewarded.
Second, CSTPC team constantly tries new things based on their understanding of
user needs. For instance, most of domestic English journals are not good enough to be
accepted by SCI, but they will not be highly cited by Chinese scientists, which drags
those journal producers into a quagmire. If we design a dedicated database for these
English journals and give corresponding indicators, the journal producers will know
what their problems are and how they could improve. Based on such considerations,
CSTPC team launched such a new database in 2002.
Third, linguistic diversity is very important. Although English is the working
language of international scientific community, it will not be a wise choice for scientists
in non-English countries to publish only in English journals. Linguistic diversity is the
prerequisite of cultural diversity, while cultural diversity leads to alternative problem
solving approaches, which would benefit the whole humankind. Therefore, non-English
databases like CSTPC will be useful in other countries, in particular developing
countries. Spain has a database for domestic Spanish journals, called ICYT, but they
have not developed an equivalent of JCR.7 We hope to see more of such database in the
world.
Fourth, the existence of other similar databases constitutes a competitive pressure,
which forces CSTPC team to improve its products and services constantly. Chinese
Science Citation Database, a database developed by the Documentation and Information
Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is also very influential among the Chinese
science community,9 while Chinese Social Science Citation Index, co-developed by
Nanjing University and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is more
popular among Chinese scholars of social science and humanities.10 It should be noted,
though, that increasingly widespread application of such databases further creates a
stronger demand for them. Therefore, the existence of other databases also helps
CSTPC to some extent, and vice versa.

This study was supported by a grant (No. 70073007) from the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (NSFC).

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References

1. MINISTRY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Survey Data on China’s R & D Resources, May 2002
(in Chinese).
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Index, World Books, 1988, No.1 (in Chinese).
3. ISTIC, Statistics and analysis of China’s S & T Papers, Science, Technology and Development, 5 (2)
(1990) 1–9 (in Chinese).
4. ISTIC, Chinese S & T Papers Statistics and Analysis 2000, an annual report released by ISTIC,
December 2001 (in Chinese).
5. ISTIC, Chinese S & T Papers Statistics and Analysis 1993, an annual report released by ISTIC,
December 1994 (in Chinese).
6. B. H. JIN, L. LI, R. ROUSSEAU, Production and Productivity of Chinese Scientists as a Function of Their
Age: The Period 1995–1999, These Proceedings, 2003.
7. M. BORDONS, M. T. FERNANDEZ, I. GÓMEZ, Advantages and limitations in the use of impact factor
measures for the assessment of research performance in a peripheral country, Scientometrics, 53 (2002)
195–206.
8. ISTIC, Chinese S & T Journals (English Edition) Citation Reports 2001, August 2003.
9. B. H. JIN, B. WANG, Chinese Science Citation Database: its construction and application, Scientometrics,
45 (1999) 325–332.
10. X. N. SU, X. M. HAN, X. N. HAN, Developing the Chinese Social Science Citation Index, Online
Information Review, 25 (6) (2001) 365–369.

Scientometrics 60 (2004) 397

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