Comments on the paper “Developing English-language academic journals of China”

Scientometrics, Vol. 57, No. 1 (2003) published an article “Developing Englishlanguage academic journals of China” co-authored by Li Li and Fenglian Zhang from Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R.China. Obviously, the viewpoints the authors expressed are seriously misinterpreting or misleading. Firstly, under certain circumstances, a leading author in order of his/her position in the name list of publication is actually not the responsible author. Some authoritative scholars' names are never placed first in their published works if they write in alphabetical order, or they are important figures and practice ‘noblesse oblige’, putting their names last. So, Li & Zhang’s statistics of the first authors’ regional distribution is highly unreliable. Secondly, it is common sense that use of “citation” or “reference” to estimate quality or impact is subject to critique. Most criticism pertains to the problem of the unknown motivations of the citing author (EGGHE & ROUSSEAU, 1990). Various motivations for citing are summarized (SMITH, 1981), amongst which one finds: