Chinese authors far less likely to be published in top journals

Researchers based in China face persistent and substantial disadvantage in getting their work published in the world’s most influential science journals, according to an extensive new study of editorial decision-making.

The analysis of 110,303 manuscripts shows that bias against researchers extends even to those who are based in the West but have Chinese-sounding names.

Researchers reviewed submissions to the journals Science and Science Advances between 2016 and 2020 and found that authors based in the US or Canada were accepted at 3.3 times the rate of those based in China, with acceptance rates of 8.3 per cent against just 2.5 per cent.

Using non-anonymised submission data, the study’s authors compared outcomes for authors with Chinese last names based in China against those based in the US, and for US-based authors with Chinese versus non-Chinese surnames. Those with Chinese last names and Chinese affiliations experienced worse outcomes at nearly every stage of review, at both journals.

The penalty did not shrink once a manuscript reached peer review; statistically, the disadvantage measured at the initial editorial screening stage was no different from the disadvantage that remained at final decision.

The study’s authors, Sam Zhang and Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado Boulder, offered one possible explanation. Intense pressure on Chinese scholars to publish in high-impact titles, including from past government incentive schemes, may have driven an unusually high volume of submissions from China to these journals regardless of fit, prompting editors to filter out the resulting influx during the earliest review stages, they said.

“With the rise of AI slop and the ability to mass produce junk science, the role of established gatekeepers like these elite journals becomes more important,” said Zhang, the study’s first author and assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Vermont, who completed his doctorate at CU Boulder.

Institutional prestige compounds the geographic pattern. Manuscripts from the most prestigious quintile of corresponding authors’ institutions were accepted at 11.6 per cent, compared with 3.4 per cent for the two least prestigious quintiles, a gap the authors describe as a further structural filter layered on top of, rather than separate from, the disadvantage facing international and Chinese-affiliated scholars.

Clauset, professor of computer science at CU Boulder and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, said the findings should prompt scrutiny of how gatekeeping shapes which discoveries reach the public. “There is no science without scientists, so it’s important to know who has the opportunity to be in the room, so to speak, and who does not, to make discoveries,” he said.

He cautioned that the results do not prove deliberate bias from editors or reviewers but said they raise questions the scientific community must confront. “In the current environment where the integrity of science is being attacked in bad faith, we need to be thinking about whether the processes at these journals live up to the ideals the scientific community has set for them,” Clauset said.