A Survey of Enhanced Publication Features of China’s Science and Technology Research Journals in 2018

Enhanced publication features that extend information access, add variety to presentation formats, and improve reader comprehension have become a part of China’s academic journals in science and technology (sci-tech for short) in recent years. We sought to determine the degree of their adoption. By surveying 472 Chinese sci-tech journals, we found that 102 of these journals had enhanced publication features. Thus less than a quarter of Chinese sci-tech journals in our sample had adopted enhanced publication at the time of our survey. Moreover, the enhancing features of the 102 journals were mostly simple ones, which did not depend on authors providing supplemental content. More of these 102 journals are published by scholarly associations than by other types of publishers, and the disciplinary distribution of the journals was imbalanced, with the discipline of medicine and health having the lowest percentage of journals with enhanced features among those disciplines with such journals. This finding is out of step with large international publishers, whose medical journals frequently have features of enhanced publication. These results reveal a gap between the practices of large international publishers and those of China’s publishers when it comes to adopting enhanced publishing features for sci-tech journals.