{"id":1079,"date":"2020-11-04T13:29:26","date_gmt":"2020-11-04T13:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/?p=1079"},"modified":"2020-11-04T13:29:26","modified_gmt":"2020-11-04T13:29:26","slug":"the-hidden-language-policy-of-chinas-research-evaluation-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/the-hidden-language-policy-of-chinas-research-evaluation-reform\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hidden Language Policy of China\u2019s Research Evaluation Reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some Suggestions on Standardizing the Use of SCI Paper Indexes<\/a>\u201d and \u201cSome Measures to Eliminate the Bad Orientation of \u2018Papers Only<\/a>\u2019.\u201d Elaborating the academic reform that President Xi has pursued since 2016, they provide the first detailed steps for dramatically reducing the role of the Science Citation Index (SCI)<\/a> in evaluating Chinese research.<\/span><\/p>\n

For twenty years, the SCI\u2014a prestige listing of \u201chigh impact\u201d scientific journals\u2014controlled the careers of Chinese researchers. It and various derived indices are commonly used for university rankings and research evaluation (the UK, for example, uses SCI-derived data<\/a> to allocate funding), but China relied on the SCI to an unusual degree<\/a>. There, quotas for publishing in SCI journals governed hiring and advancement, pay bonuses, and even graduation from doctoral programs. In using the SCI as a \u201cgold standard,\u201d Chinese administrators sought to increase productivity, enhance national prestige, and benchmark the closure of gaps between China\u2019s research sector and cutting-edge work internationally.<\/span><\/p>\n

To a significant extent, these goals have been met. China has risen rapidly up international rankings, and Chinese research productivity routinely exceeds the world average (Li & Wang, 2019<\/a>). Since 2016, China has been the world\u2019s largest producer of published research<\/a>, accounting for over a third of all global activity (Xie & Freeman, 2018<\/a>, p. 2). Since 2017, Chinese research has been the second-most cited (after US research). The Nature<\/em> Index now ranks Beijing as the world\u2019s number one \u201cscience city,\u201d<\/a> with Shanghai as number five (the other three are American). Despite US status as the world leader for the past several decades, one analysis (Lee & Haupt, 2020<\/a>) concluded that US research outputs would have fallen over the last five years except for collaborations with Chinese researchers, while Chinese outputs would have grown regardless.<\/span><\/p>\n

So why change a winning formula? The Ministries\u2019 announcements have focused on eliminating perverse incentives<\/a> created by over-reliance on the SCI, which saw researchers prioritizing quantity over quality, nepotistically inflating citation counts, and falling prey to predatory journals<\/a>. The Chinese government has, accordingly, allocated tens of millions of dollars to initiatives for improving Chinese journal quality<\/a> and combating corrupt publishing practices. At the same time, commentators have noted the potential cost savings<\/a> of de-centering SCI metrics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another factor, however, has been largely overlooked. Ninety-seven percent of papers indexed in the SCI are in English (Liu, 2016<\/a>)\u2014the lingua franca <\/em>of scientific communication. To remain competitive in major international journals, almost all of the top research-producing countries now publish the majority of their articles in English, with the share of native-language publications declining every year in virtually every country (Van Weijen, 2012<\/a>)\u2014except China.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not for lack of trying. The Chinese government has done everything in its power to channel its research outputs into English to boost their global impact, but, although it has been a decade since China technically became the world\u2019s largest English-speaking country<\/a>, the quality of ESL instruction remains uneven (Baldi, 2016<\/a>). Studies show that even the most advanced L2 speakers of English experience disproportionate rejection rates in scholarly publishing (Pearce, 2002<\/a>), as well as a slew of other systemic barriers<\/a>, compared to their native-English-speaking peers, and most of China\u2019s English students never reach such advanced proficiencies to begin with.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moreover, the growth of ESL capacity in China has simply been outstripped by the growth in research. As Xie & Freeman (2018<\/a>, p. 7) noted, between 2000 and 2016, \u201cChina more than doubled its number of faculty and tripled its number of researchers\u2014all of whom had to find venues for publishing.\u201d China now graduates twice as many university students per year as the US and employs the largest number of laboratory scientists of any nation on Earth (Han & Appelbaum, 2018<\/a>), with the result that China is now the only country whose native-language scientific publication in domestic journals is rising alongside<\/em> its growth in international, English-language publications (Xie & Freeman, 2018<\/a>, p. 5). China simply needs, and is creating, new university faculty and new labs far faster than it can create new English speakers, and it can no longer afford to limit growth in the former category to meet metrics that depend on the latter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reading between those lines, the shift in language policy embedded in the new assessment policy becomes clear, as it does not merely eliminate requirements to publish in SCI journals, but adds requirements that at least one-third of the publications used for evaluating researchers must be published in domestic journals<\/a>. Not all domestic journals publish in Mandarin, but nearly half of those identified as priority venues in the Ministry\u2019s action plan<\/a> do, and, given the constraints in China\u2019s ESL systems, the Mandarin-language journal sector will doubtless expand faster than the domestic English-language one, such that a substantial increase in Mandarin-language publications is almost guaranteed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chinese authorities have repeatedly shown themselves willing, if not eager, to rewrite the rules of the international game. One thinks of efforts to challenge the dollar\u2019s status<\/a> as global reserve currency and notes that the status of English as scientific lingua franca<\/em> poses a similar constraint on Chinese ambitions, bottlenecking new research capacity and disadvantaging Chinese researchers in the international arena. As one engineering professor expressed it, by encouraging Mandarin-language publications, \u201cThis [policy change] will, to some extent, isolate the Chinese researchers from the global research community<\/a>\u201d\u2014a sentiment echoed by the chief managing editor of the Chinese journal Research<\/em>, who suggested that Chinese researchers would still largely eschew journals published in Mandarin owing to their \u201cinaccessibility \u2026 to international scholars<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Such pessimism assumes, however, that China can only emerge into the world and not change it. For most of modern history, there was no single scientific <\/a>lingua franca<\/em><\/a>. Until the Second World War, English, French, and German all held substantial shares of global research activity, and a reading knowledge of two, if not all three, of those languages was a common expectation of professional researchers. After the war, German and French receded, but Russian remained a viable competitor to English in many fields through the middle of the century. Only in the 1970s did English emerge as the <\/em>language of science. Unleashing China\u2019s full potential would not require replacing English as the hegemonic standard for scientific communication, but only establishing Mandarin alongside it in a bilingual research ecosystem, effectively claiming for the 2020s the role that German and French held in the 1920s.<\/span><\/p>\n

If the Chinese Communist Party can establish the country as a world leader<\/a> in AI, data science, robotics, and other 21st-century fields, the world will not be able to ignore a third (or more) of its total research output, no matter what language it is published in, and the Party knows this. Putting Mandarin-language journals on an even footing with English-language ones in domestic assessments may be a modest first step, but it opens onto a road whose destination was envisioned years ago by academics like Chun-Hua Yan, the former associate editor-in-chief of the Beijing-based Journal of Rare Earths<\/em>, who dreamed that journals published in Mandarin would one day be \u201cfollowed by scientists around the world<\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Race MoChridhe, MLIS, is Scholarly Communication Coordinator at Atla<\/a>. He reads multiple languages (to which he is now working to add Mandarin) and writes regularly on the intersections of library science, scholarly communication, and applied linguistics. You can learn more about his work at his website<\/a> or by following him<\/a> on Twitter.<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>Image credit: University of Westminster’s China Visual Arts Project<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Race MoChridhe In February, China\u2019s Ministries of Education and of Science and Technology released two documents that reshaped the research landscape: \u201cSome Suggestions on Standardizing the Use of SCI Paper Indexes\u201d and \u201cSome Measures to Eliminate the Bad…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":248,"featured_media":1080,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[21,107,157],"class_list":["post-1079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-six","tag-academia","tag-language","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/248"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1079\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.westminster.ac.uk\/contemporarychina\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}