IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32468.html

Paper Tiger? Chinese Science and Home Bias in Citations

Author

Listed:
  • Shumin Qiu
  • Claudia Steinwender
  • Pierre Azoulay

Abstract

We investigate the phenomenon of home bias in scientific citations, where researchers disproportionately cite work from their own country. We develop a benchmark for expected citations based on the relative size of countries, defining home bias as deviations from this norm. Our findings reveal that China exhibits the largest home bias across all major countries and in nearly all scientific fields studied. This stands in contrast to the pattern of home bias for China’s trade in goods and services, where China does not stand out from most industrialized countries. After adjusting citation counts for home bias, we demonstrate that China’s apparent rise in citation rankings is overstated. Our adjusted ranking places China fourth globally, behind the US, the UK, and Germany, tempering the perception of China’s scientific dominance.

Suggested Citation

  • Shumin Qiu & Claudia Steinwender & Pierre Azoulay, 2024. "Paper Tiger? Chinese Science and Home Bias in Citations," NBER Working Papers 32468, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32468
    Note: PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32468.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Antonin Bergeaud & Ruveyda Nur Gozen & John Van Reenen, 2026. "Mapping Technological Trajectories: Evidence from Two Centuries of Patent Data," NBER Working Papers 34760, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Yang, Xiaoliang & Zhou, Peng, 2025. "Unveiling citation bias in economics: Taste-based discrimination against Chinese-authored papers," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • O32 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Management of Technological Innovation and R&D

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32468. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.