Home bias in Chinese science is overestimated
The rapid rise of Chinese science has reshaped the global research landscape. China has become one of the largest producers of scientific publications and now contributes a substantial share of the world’s highly cited papers. Yet, this rise has recently generated growing concerns that Chinese science receives a disproportionately large share of citations from China, indicating that Chinese papers exhibit the strongest citation home bias among major countries.1,2 However, existing evidence has largely focused on who cites Chinese papers rather than whom Chinese papers cite. This distinction is critical, as a high domestic share among the citations received by Chinese papers may reflect not an unusually strong preference for domestic work among Chinese scientists, but rather fewer-than-expected citations from papers in other countries.
Using journal articles and conference proceedings from 15 major countries in the Dimensions dataset,3 we revisit the claim by distinguishing citation home bias and reference home bias. We find that Chinese papers exhibit a relatively weaker tendency to cite domestic papers than do papers from other major countries. Notably, we also find that Chinese scientists are not unusually inclined to cite their own prior work compared to their counterparts from other countries. Our results suggest that China’s home bias has likely been overstated by indicators based only on received citations, and such home bias partly reflects asymmetric global knowledge flow.
Recent work measured citation home bias by comparing the share of domestic citations received by a country with that country's share of global publications.1 Specifically, the citation home bias of country i is defined as its domestic share of citations received minus its publication share (Figure 1A). This measure adjusts for the fact that large scientific countries naturally receive more domestic citations. Following prior research,1 we focus on 1,581,955 articles and conference proceedings published between 2005 and 2020 in venues ranked in the top 10% by the SCImago Journal Rank (i.e., SJR) in the Dimensions dataset, and use fractional counting to assign a paper to countries.3 We find that China exhibits a markedly higher citation home bias than any other country in our sample (Figure 1B), which is consistent with prior research.1 We also use the corresponding author’s country as the paper’s affiliated country, finding consistent results.3 However, this measure captures the geography of received citations, not the citing behavior of Chinese papers. A country may appear highly home biased if its papers receive relatively few citations from other countries compared to expectations. In that case, the domestic share of its received citations will be high even if scientists do not cite domestic work more than scientists from other countries. This is especially important for China, as prior evidence suggested that Chinese papers may be under-cited in some fields even after research quality is carefully controlled.4 Thus, citation home bias may partly capture potentially limited international recognition of Chinese research rather than domestic citation preference alone.
