Letter to the Editor
Chinese-language articles are biased in citations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2015.05.005Get rights and content

Introduction

In a paper published recently, Li, Qiao, Li, and Jin (2014) analyzed citations received by Chinese- and English-language articles published in Chinese-English bilingual journals indexed by Scopus and Web of Science (WoS). They concluded that Chinese-language articles were not biased in citations compared with English-language articles published in the same journal, as no significant difference was found in terms of the mean citations received between the set of Chinese-language articles and the set of English-language articles published in these journals. We disagree with their interpretation of the results: in order to investigate language bias in citations, one must take into account the well-known fact that scholars prefer to cite articles in their native language (Bookstein & Yitzhaki, 1999). This is also the case for Chinese researchers: Tang, Shapira, and Youtie (2015) revealed that a high rate of internal citations exists among Chinese researchers.

Therefore, to answer the question of whether Chinese-language articles are biased in citations compared with English-language articles, Chinese scholars’ contributions to the citations received should be excluded from consideration or be analyzed separately from those of researchers from other countries.

Section snippets

Methods

Using the same data source and methodology as Li et al. (2014), we selected Chinese-English bilingual journals from Scopus and WoS according to the following three steps:

  • (1)

    Retrieval of Chinese-language articles published in 2010–2011 and find corresponding journals.

  • (2)

    Removal of journals which published articles only in Chinese, or in languages other than Chinese and English, from the list of retrieved journals.

  • (3)

    Removal of journals from source countries other than “Peoples R China” (e.g. Hong Kong,

Results

In a manner similar to Li et al. (2014), we found that China (defined as People's Republic of China excluding Hong Kong and Macau) contributed to most articles published in, and to citations received by, Chinese-English bilingual journals. As Table 1 indicates, China contributed to 96.6% articles (97.6% of total Chinese-language articles and 88.2% of total English-language articles) published in these journals in Scopus and 95.7% articles (97.0% of total Chinese-language articles and 85.0% of

Discussions and conclusion

We found that there is not much difference between Chinese-language articles and English-language articles in receiving citations from Chinese scholars, but that a big difference exists in receiving citations from non-Chinese scholars. As a result, we cannot conclude, as does Li et al. (2014), that Chinese-language articles are not biased in citations compared with English-language ones. Chinese language articles are undoubtedly biased in terms of citations, as are most articles published in

References (4)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (13)

  • Contradiction and mechanism analysis of science and technology input-output: Evidence from key universities in China

    2022, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
    Citation Excerpt :

    Secondly, heterogeneous resources have different values in different regions, time and markets, and the ways in which organizations acquire and utilize heterogeneous resources will also vary according to the situation in which the organizations are located [50]. Unfortunately, the RBV does not take into account the situational factors of resources [51]. In order to solve these theoretical defects, considering that China has an obvious contrast in the input-output of scientific research, which is more representative than other countries, we choose China as the research background.

  • Tracing the main path of interdisciplinary research considering citation preference: A case from blockchain domain

    2021, Journal of Informetrics
    Citation Excerpt :

    But for most papers, considering research areas and publication time is beneficial to evaluate their influence objectively. Some other factors were investigated by scholars to design a more objective impact assessment method, such as the language (Li, Qiao, Li, & Jin, 2014; Shu & Larivière, 2015), gender (Thelwall, 2020), collaboration patterns (Thelwall & Maflahi, 2019), and open access (Bautista-Puig, Lopez-Illescas, de Moya-Anegon, Guerrero-Bote, & Moed, 2020). Among these potential bias, discipline bias and time bias have been extensively studied (Galiani & Gálvez, 2019).

  • Are Altmetric.com scores effective for research impact evaluation in the social sciences and humanities?

    2021, Journal of Informetrics
    Citation Excerpt :

    In this section, we propose nine transparency items (see Appendix B; Table B1), and related information about Altmetric.com scores was searched and displayed to qualitatively analyze whether Altmetric.com scores are transparent or not; previous studies which with quantitative analysis are combined to present the transparency issues of Altmetric.com scores. The systematic biases of evaluation indicators are mainly rooted in language, geographic position, and the groups of users (Hicks, 1999; Kyvik, 1988; Moed, 2016; Shu & Larivière, 2015). However, whether Altmetric.com scores are biased to certain groups, such as younger people or those with a professional interest in research (Neylon, Willmers, & King, 2014; Priem, 2014), it cannot be quantified because no accurate statistics or platforms can provide accurate individual statistics (Bornmann, 2014).

  • The True Impact of China’s International Publications

    2022, Journal of Library Science in China
View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text