Publish or impoverish

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the landscape of the cash-per-publication reward policy in China and reveal its trend since the late 1990s. Design/methodology/approach This study is based on the analysis of 168 university documents regarding the cash-per-publication reward policy at 100 Chinese universities. Findings Chinese universities offer cash rewards from USD30 to USD165,000 for papers published in journals indexed by Web of Science, and the average reward amount has been increasing for the past ten years. Originality/value The cash-per-publication reward policy in China has never been systematically studied and investigated before except for in some case studies. This is the first paper that reveals the landscape of the cash-per-publication reward policy in China.