Twenty years of Chinese social sciences towards internationalization (1998–2017): a knowledge sources perspective

This study uncovers the internationalization of Chinese social sciences in knowledge sources through the quantitative analysis of foreign language references cited by China’s domestically published social science papers. It’s found that in the 20 years from 1998 to 2017, the number and proportion of international knowledge sources utilized in Chinese social sciences increased greatly, and the distribution of languages became more concentrated in English. For journals as major international knowledge sources, Chinese social scientists consistently preferred those indexed by Web of Science, and their citation pattern conforms to Garfield’s Law of Concentration. Some of the disciplines continuously focused on international journals in their fields, but others increasingly utilized interdisciplinary knowledge. The strong demand of Chinese social scientists for journals with high impact was basically stable over 20 years, while older articles instead of recent ones were preferred generally and increasingly. On the basis of the above findings, this study further discloses that China’s knowledge production in social sciences also experienced rapid internationalization like its knowledge utilization, and the association between international knowledge production and utilization is statistically significant at the discipline level and journal level. Finally, policy-related issues and enlightenments for social sciences in non-English speaking countries are discussed.