Reassessing scientific dominance: How China’s citation home bias inflates its ranking
Qiu, Steinwender & Azoulay: "Paper tiger? Chinese science and home bias in citations" Journal of International Economics Volume 157
The global discourse surrounding China’s emergence as the world’s leading producer of scientific articles often relies on citation counts as a proxy for quality. However, this metric is subject to limitations, especially in cross-national comparisons, where “home bias”—the tendency for researchers to disproportionately cite domestic work—can distort results.
Shumin Qiu (East China University of Science and Technology), Claudia Steinwender (LMU Munich), and Pierre Azoulay (MIT Sloan School of Management) address this challenge by developing a systematic method to quantify this bias, providing a benchmark built on structural models commonly used in the international trade literature.
The authors define home bias as the deviation of a country’s actual citation rate from a benchmark based purely on the relative size of the citing and cited countries. Their results establish China as a clear outlier, exhibiting the largest home bias among all major countries studied. Quantitatively, China’s home bias stands at 42.3%, significantly higher than the US at 15.9%. Furthermore, this phenomenon is pervasive, with China demonstrating the strongest home bias in 18 out of 20 broad scientific fields. This pattern is unique to the scientific domain; the study notes that, in contrast, China’s home bias in the trade of goods and services is not exceptionally large when compared to other industrialized nations.
The implication of this pervasive bias is highly relevant for global rankings, particularly if home citations reflect strategic or institutional considerations rather than genuine intellectual engagement. The authors propose an adjusted metric that discounts these inflated home citations. While China ranks second globally based on raw citation totals, implementing the de-biased calculation causes China to fall to fourth position, ranking behind the US, the UK, and Germany.
This revised assessment tempers the perception of China’s scientific dominance and offers a more measured data point for policymakers concerned with the pace and quality of global scientific output.
Link: Paper tiger? Chinese science and home bias in citations
