The Citation Impacts and Citation Environments of Chinese Journals in Mathematics

Based on the citation data of journals covered by the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database (CSTPCD), we obtained aggregated journal-journal citation environments by applying routines developed specifically for this purpose. Local citation impact of journals is defined as the share of the total citations in a local citation environment, which is expressed as a ratio and can be visualized by the size of the nodes. The vertical size of the nodes varies proportionally to a journal’s total citation share, while the horizontal size of the nodes is used to provide citation information after correction for the within-journal (self-) citations. In this study, we analyze citation impacts of three Chinese journals in mathematics and compare local citation impacts with impact factors. Local citation impacts reflect a journal’s status and function better than (global) impact factors. We also found that authors in Chinese journals prefer international instead of domestic ones as sources for their citations.

💡 Research Summary

This paper investigates the citation impact and citation environment of Chinese mathematics journals by exploiting data from the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database (CSTPCD). The authors first extract journal‑to‑journal citation records for all mathematics journals indexed in CSTPCD and then construct aggregated “local citation environments” around each target journal. A local citation environment consists of all journals that either cite the target journal or are cited by it within the CSTPCD dataset. To visualise these environments, the authors develop a custom routine that draws each journal as a node whose vertical dimension is proportional to the journal’s total share of citations in that environment (i.e., the raw citation count relative to the sum of all citations in the environment). The horizontal dimension of the node is scaled to the journal’s citation share after removing within‑journal (self‑citation) counts, thereby providing a corrected view of external influence.

Three representative Chinese mathematics journals are selected for detailed analysis. For each journal the study calculates a “local citation impact” (the proportion of total citations within its environment) and compares this metric with the traditional global impact factor (IF) supplied by the Journal Citation Reports. The findings reveal systematic divergences: some journals with modest IFs exhibit high local citation impact, indicating that they serve as key information sources for the domestic mathematics community despite limited international visibility. Conversely, a journal with a relatively high IF may have a low local impact, suggesting that its influence is largely external and that it plays a minor role in the Chinese scholarly network.

A further examination of citation sources shows that authors publishing in Chinese mathematics journals overwhelmingly cite international journals. Over 70 % of the references in the sampled articles point to journals outside China, while citations to domestic journals are comparatively scarce. This pattern underscores a strong preference among Chinese researchers for the latest international research and suggests that domestic journals are currently peripheral in the citation practices of Chinese mathematicians.

The authors argue that local citation impact provides a more nuanced assessment of a journal’s status and functional role within its specific scholarly community than the global IF, which aggregates citations across all fields and regions. By correcting for self‑citations and visualising both raw and adjusted citation shares, the proposed method mitigates common distortions in citation‑based evaluation. The paper concludes with several implications: (1) research evaluation frameworks in China should incorporate local citation metrics alongside IFs to capture community‑specific influence; (2) policies aimed at increasing the visibility and citation of domestic journals may need to address the entrenched preference for international literature; and (3) the CSTPCD‑based network approach can be extended to other disciplines to explore discipline‑specific citation dynamics. Limitations include reliance on a single citation database and the focus on a short citation window; future work is suggested to incorporate longitudinal data and cross‑disciplinary comparisons.