Chinese policymakers are discussing ways to reduce the incentives for scientific researchers to submit their findings to foreign journals, as Beijing grows concerned that academic publications could be a channel for leaks of industrial and technological innovations.
The government could push Chinese universities and research institutions to reduce or remove the weight given to publishing in leading international journals in deciding academic promotion and tenure, the people said.
The national security concerns have become a new factor in Beijing’s long-running campaign to curb what it sees as over-reliance on international journal metrics such as the Science Citation Index for assessing researchers and institutions.
“The root of the problem lies in a research evaluation system that prioritises SCI publications above all else,” said one of the people familiar with the situation, a former official. “To address this issue, scholars’ career advancement needs to be delinked from SCI publication.”
China’s Ministry of State Security last month accused a researcher of leaking “important technical details” while trying to win acceptance of papers by international journals and academic conferences.
In official guidance issued in 2021, the human resources and education ministries warned higher education institutions against relying on “rigid” publication requirements. Increasing US-China rivalry has since helped make security a prominent concern in scientific exchanges.
Several government departments, including the Ministry of Science and Technology, are considering a framework that would incorporate national security considerations into science evaluation, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Beijing in August last year stepped up efforts to tighten oversight of foreign academic publishing and to encourage local scholars to publish high-impact work in Chinese journals.
One executive at an international scientific publisher reported seeing a fall in submission numbers from China since the beginning of this year. Another said they had noticed pressure for Chinese researchers to publish in domestic journals, but this had not yet translated into a fall in submissions.
China’s science policy has been shifting from emphasis on global collaboration and publication in international journals towards tighter controls on how knowledge is shared overseas. The change comes amid geopolitical tensions and the country’s rapid technological advance.
“The Chinese science system has shifted from a catch-up mode to a great power mode,” said Denis Simon, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute in Washington.
“It is no longer China as a kind of knowledge-acquisition country. It is how China manages its own knowledge that protects its national security and yet at the same time promotes its own scientific prestige and achievements,” Simon said.
Publication in prestigious global science journals such as Nature and Cell has for decades played a key role in assessments of Chinese researchers for promotion and funding and in institutional rankings.
While Beijing has long had rules requiring scientists to protect sensitive information, enforcement has been uneven partly because of the entrenched incentives around SCI-indexed publications, according to an official at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who declined to be named.
“The secrecy law is already there,” the official said. “The problem is that management has not been properly enforced.”
Papers by China-based authors accounted for almost a third of the global total in the SCI — a database of leading international scientific journals — in 2024, up from 5 per cent two decades earlier.
But the emphasis on SCI-indexed publications also created perverse incentives, fuelling academic misconduct including inflated publication records, and papers based on manipulated or fabricated data.
Beijing has in recent years unveiled rules aimed at reducing the dominance of SCI in academic evaluation, which has been described in China as “SCI worship”.
Last August, the National Natural Science Foundation of China for the first time required that at least 20 per cent of representative papers produced by its funded projects be published in Chinese journals.
Some Chinese journals are included in the SCI index, but they accounted for less than 5 per cent of the SCI papers published by domestic researchers in 2023, according to public records.
One person at a leading western publication said Chinese university administrators had been tasked with changing the intensely competitive culture around publication, which had resulted in some academics prioritising “quantity over quality”.
The science and education ministries did not reply to requests for comment.
China’s security ministry in June warned that submissions to international conferences, publications in foreign journals, cross-border academic exchanges and overseas collaborative research must all “strictly” follow the requirements of “review before public disclosure” and “approval before external release”.
The ministry said on social media that an unnamed Chinese researcher had included “core equipment structures, key technical parameters and distinctive experimental sample data” in submissions aimed at securing acceptance by international journals and academic conferences.
One Chinese scholar in materials science said he had stopped submitting research to foreign journals because it had become “difficult” to pass security reviews, which he said were “unclear and insufficiently objective” and part of a process that discouraged overseas publication.
Reducing international publication and other exchanges could make it more difficult for China to achieve its scientific ambitions, but some Chinese scientists support greater scrutiny.
A scientist in Beijing, who asked to be identified only by his surname Huang, said China was already at the frontier in many fields so there was less to gain from publishing in foreign journals.
“The right approach is to reveal enough to make the point, but not so much as to give everything away,” he said.