A bibliometric study of biodiversity research in China

Biodiversity provides a platform humans can thrive on, and it is vital for ensuring the sustainable development of society. China is one of the megadiverse countries in the world, and was also among the earliest to join the Convention on Biological Diversity. Since the launch of the Biodiversity Conservation Plan in China in 1994, researchers in China have devoted more than 10 years of hard work in the area of biodiversity and published a large number of research papers and documents. A search was conducted for papers on biodiversity using the Science Citation Index Expanded, using TS = ("biological diversity" OR biodiversity OR "species diversity" OR "species richness" OR "genetic diversity" OR ecosystem * OR communities OR "ecosystem function" OR "bio * invasion" OR "invasive species" OR "endangered species" OR "conservation biology" OR "biodiversity conservation" OR biogeography OR "new species" OR taxonomy OR phylogeny OR "landscape diversity"). By analyzing and comparing characteristic figures, this paper accesses the current status and international influence of biodiversity studies in China, and also attempts to provide direction for possible future research. Between 1997 and 2009, 219773 papers addressing various facets of biodiversity were published globally, with twice as many published in 2009 compared with 1997. During these 13 years, China exhibited the fastest growth rate in terms of the quantity of such papers, with 110 papers published in 1997 and 20 times that number published in 2009, when compared with 207 countries and regions in the world. Globally, the percentage of these papers originating in China continues to increase, growing from 1.23% in 1997 to 7.81% in 2009. China ranks 7 super(th) with 11182 papers published during this time period, representing 5.08% of the total number published on biodiversity globally. Members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published the largest quantity of papers related to various facets of biodiversity in the world when compared with the members of other institutes, which is more than twice the average number of the seven major institutes in the United States. However, among the top ten institutes in terms of quantity, China ranks at the bottom based on citations per paper and the h-index. Among the 10 most cited papers with one or more authors from China, all of them are joint efforts of Chinese and international institutes, and none of them has an author from China as the first author or the corr