TY  - JOUR
AU  - REN, Shengli
AU  - YU, Zhenglu
AU  - NING, Bi
AU  - CHEN, Zhe
PY  - 2026
TI  - China's English-Language Sci-Tech Journals in 2025: Policy-Guided Expansion, Quality Upgrading, and International Influence Building
JO  - Science-Technology & Publication
SN  - 1005-0590
SP  - 56
EP  - 67
VL  - 45
IS  - 3
AB  - Driven by the sustained implementation of the action plan for developing excellent scientific journals and by continued national policy guidance, China's English-language scientific journals made further progress in 2025 in terms of quantity growth, quality improvement, and international influence. This article reviews that development trajectory by focusing on newly approved journals, project-based support, international database inclusion, major impact indicators, existing structural weaknesses, and the policy measures introduced to respond to those weaknesses. In terms of journal expansion, the National Press and Publication Administration approved 29 English-language scientific journals with CN numbers in 2025, among which journals sponsored by universities accounted for 75.9%. This distribution not only reflects the strong participation of universities in English-language journal publishing, but also indicates that higher education institutions remain a major organizational basis for the continued growth of China's English-language scientific journal system. At the same time, Phase Ⅱ of the high-startup new journal program under the action plan selected 65 English-language journals. These funded journals are concentrated in frontier, interdisciplinary, and strategically important fields, and their sponsoring institutions show a marked clustering effect, suggesting that journal development is increasingly linked with discipline concentration and institutional aggregation. In terms of international indexing and influence, two journals from China were newly included in SCI in 2025, and about 80 were newly included in ESCI. Among the 292 SCI-indexed journals from the Chinese mainland, 194 ranked in Q1 in their respective subject categories, and 22 journals ranked first worldwide across 23 subject categories. In Scopus, the number of English-language scientific journals from the Chinese mainland reached 699. Of the 48 journals newly indexed in 2025, 95.8% adopted the open-access model. These figures collectively show that China's English-language scientific journals continued to enhance their international visibility, disciplinary competitiveness, and platform presence. At the same time, the article underscores that progress in indicators does not eliminate the structural pressure faced by domestic journals. Although the average impact factor of China's SCI journals is significantly higher than the global average, their total citation counts and article volumes remain below international averages. More importantly, the capacity of domestic journals to carry high-level Chinese scientific output remains insufficient. In 2024, only 4.7% of China's SCI papers were published in domestic journals, revealing the continuing outflow of high-quality manuscript sources. In response to this problem, China introduced a series of policy measures in 2025 in areas such as award applications, submission of project outputs, and the management of article processing charges, with the aim of encouraging some representative research achievements to be published first in domestic journals. According to the article, such policy interventions help reshape the publication pattern of China's academic achievements from the source, and in turn support the movement of English-language scientific journals in China toward higher-quality and more sustainable development.
UR  - https://doi.org/10.16510/j.cnki.kjycb.20260327.004
DO  - 10.16510/j.cnki.kjycb.20260327.004