Current Status and Development Pathways of Enhanced Publishing among Chinese Academic Journals on the China National Knowledge Infrastructure Platform

This study aims to systematically reveal the current status, disciplinary distribution characteristics, and variations in enhanced-content formats among Chinese academic journals on the CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) platform, thereby providing empirical evidence for journals to formulate differentiated enhanced publishing strategies. A bibliometric method was adopted, with the CNKI journal database serving as the data source. Data on journals and articles with enhanced content were retrieved, and a double-entry, double-verification approach was employed for data collection and cross-checking. Systematic analyses were then conducted across multiple dimensions, including disciplinary distribution, publication volume, and content forms. CNKI classifies Chinese academic journals into 10 disciplinary categories. A total of 1 487 journals were identified as engaging in enhanced publishing, among which 248 journals had published 10 or more enhanced articles. Engineering Science and Technology Ⅱ demonstrated the largest enhanced publishing scale (207 journals, 9 037 articles), followed by Engineering Science and Technology Ⅰ (239 journals, 5 695 articles) and Economics and Management Science (148 journals, 5 571 articles). Medicine and Public Health (283 journals, 5 189 articles) and Basic Sciences (168 journals, 5 409 articles) were comparable in scale, while Information Science and Technology (91 journals, 4 341 articles) also accounted for a notable share. In contrast, Agricultural Science and Technology (116 journals, 1 097 articles) and Social Sciences Ⅱ (156 journals, 1 324 articles) lagged relatively behind, with Philosophy and Humanities (40 journals, 201 articles) and Social Sciences Ⅰ (39 journals, 331 articles) at even lower levels. The disciplinary distribution exhibited a marked clustering pattern: the top 10 journals in Information Science and Technology, Engineering Science and Technology Ⅱ, and Social Sciences Ⅰ accounted for 95.85%, 90.55%, and 91.24% of articles in their respective fields, whereas distributions in Basic Sciences and Economics and Management Science were comparatively dispersed. Significant disciplinary differences were also observed in content forms: the natural sciences primarily comprised data-intensive enhancements such as datasets, 3D models, and experimental images; the humanities and social sciences placed greater emphasis on audio and video dissemination, highlighting knowledge popularization and influence diffusion; while the economics and management field underscored the open sharing of datasets and program code to strengthen methodological transparency. Overall, enhanced publishing among Chinese academic journals has achieved notable progress, particularly demonstrating strong developmental vitality within sci-tech journals. It has played a positive role in improving the verifiability of research, expanding the modes of expressing research outcomes, and enhancing digital dissemination capabilities. Nevertheless, several issues persist, including disciplinary imbalance, concentration among leading journals, superficial content, insufficient standardization, and underdeveloped mechanisms. Going forward, enhanced publishing should be advanced through multi-platform collaboration, tiered and classified development, discipline-specific approaches, and the refinement of evaluation mechanisms. These pathways will help achieve a deep alignment with disciplinary needs, an organic integration with the knowledge structure of articles, and coordinated improvement with evaluation and normative systems, thereby transforming enhanced publishing from a supplementary function into a core capability in the digital transformation of academic journals.