Self-reliance and a wish to set the agenda might explain concerted push to produce domestic journals.
Over the past two decades, China has risen to become the world’s largest producer of scientific knowledge. According to Digital Science’s Dimensions database, last year there were almost 830,000 papers featuring researchers based in China, representing around 15% of the world’s 5.4 million articles. In 2022, the country overtook the United States in the Nature Index for contributions to natural-sciences articles for the first time. The majority of this research was disseminated in journals published by companies based in Western countries, rather than China’s own domestic publishers. The biggest 20 international publishers by output published 83% of all research articles involving authors based in China from 2012 to 2021. Read more in Nature.