Are Chinese scientists inflating their influence through ‘biased’ citations?

Studies show scholars from China tend to cite each other more than researchers from other countries, potentially pumping up their prominence

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China has surpassed the US in its output of top-cited scientific papers, giving it an edge in measures of both research quantity and quality, according to a Japanese study. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:00pm, 29 Sep 2024Updated: 7:14pm, 29 Sep 2024

Chinese scholars tend to cite papers from their own country significantly more than scholars from other nations, potentially inflating China’s scientific prominence, according to recent studies.

One analysis by Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) revealed that 62 per cent of citations to China’s top-cited papers came from within China, compared with 24 per cent for the United States, which had the second-highest rate.

A separate study, conducted by a team of researchers from China, the US, and Germany, found that China’s internal citation rate was 42 per cent higher than expected based on its publication output, while that of the US was 16 per cent higher.

The authors of the second study, titled “Paper Tigers? Chinese Science and Home Bias in Citations”, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, argue that this bias has exaggerated China’s rise in science.

According to the study, a bias-free ranking that places China lower in terms of global research impact could shed new perspective on the idea that the country is eclipsing the West in science.

In 2018, China overtook the US in total scientific output to become the world’s top producer of scientific papers, according to Nature and other sources.