Comparative analysis of the research productivity, publication quality, and collaboration patterns of top ranked library and information science schools in China and the United States

This study examines the research productivity, publication quality, and collaboration patterns of researchers from the top-ranked library and information science (LIS) schools in China and the United States using Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus data. In particular, this study investigates the monetary reward policies of the Chinese LIS schools that might influence their researchers’ publishing activities. The results show that most of the top-ranked LIS schools in China offer monetary rewards to their faculty to publish in journals indexed in WoS as first authors. In addition, the findings indicate that the number of WoS papers by researchers working in Chinese LIS schools has increased rapidly and the ratio of this number to that of such papers by their US counterparts has been rising over the past decade. However, we observe no such rising trend in papers that are indexed only in Scopus. Although the Chinese LIS schools have a higher average annual growth rate of WoS publications than US LIS schools, they still lag considerably behind their US counterparts in publication quality, as measured by citations. We also find that Chinese LIS researchers are less likely to be supporting authors on their international collaborative publications than their US counterparts.