China proposes a new way to measure academic influence in a departure from impact factor

wo new Dongbi Index journal lists were unveiled in Shanghai on Saturday.

The development team says they are “a multidimensional, multilevel evaluation system centred on research quality”.

Photo: Shutterstock Chinese researchers have introduced a new methodology for evaluating medical and life science journals worldwide that does not rely on the “impact factor” traditionally used in the academic world.

Experts view this as part of China’s broader efforts to strengthen its “academic discourse power”.

Two new Dongbi Index journal lists, covering 4,027 medical and 3,064 life-science journals selected from more than 40,000 worldwide, were unveiled in Shanghai on March 21.

They were developed by the Shenzhen-based data technology firm, Dongbi Data, in collaboration with the Institute of Medical Information & Library, an affiliate of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

The rankings and underlying data analyses mapped China’s academic output across both fields, showing that Chinese researchers contributed nearly one-third of all global academic papers in the life sciences.

Wu Dengsheng, founder of Dongbi Data and a professor at Shenzhen University’s college of management, said the team had built “a multidimensional, multilevel evaluation system centred on research quality”. “This provides crucial support for moving beyond the dominance of the impact factor – a measure of citations published within a given journal over a fixed period – and paper counts, while enhancing China’s academic voice,” he said.

At the launch, He Huan, an associate researcher at the National Cancer Centre of China, said the impact factor had many shortcomings, including being susceptible to manipulation and lacking a Chinese perspective.

These limitations, she said, had led to unfair assessments of local medical journals and research output.

She said the new rankings offered invaluable guidance for researchers when choosing where to publish, while also helping institutions conducting evaluations and policymakers optimising journal development.

Wu said that unlike impact factor, which simply counted citations, their method analysed the quality of a paper’s citations.

Based on the premise that high-quality papers tended to cite studies also published in high-quality journals, the team constructed a vast citation network.

Drawing on data from 2023 to 2025, and a complex set of quantitative methods, the journals were grouped into four categories – A, B, C and D – forming a pyra

原文链接: 南华早报