A comparative study of research performance in computer science

The paper compares the research performance in computer science of four major Western countries, India and China, based on the data abstracted from INSPEC database during the period 1993–2002. A total of 9,632 computer science papers recorded in INSPEC database were used for the comparison. The findings indicate that, on the one hand, the number of papers produced in China has considerably increased in the past few years. Particularly, in recent years, China occupies a remarkable high position in terms of counts of papers indexed by the INSPEC database. On the other hand, Chinese scientists preferred to publish in domestic journals and proceedings and shares of SCI-papers to the total journal papers for China have still remained the lowest. This indicates that the research activities of Chinese scientists in computer science are still rather “local” and suffer from a low international visibility. Various scientometric indicators, such as Normalized Impact Factor, ratio of papers in high quality journals are further adopted to analyze research performance and diverse finding are obtained. Nevertheless, for these surrogate indicators, China has optimistically achieved great progress, characterized with “low level of beginning and high speed of developing”. The policy implication of the findings lies in that China, as well as other less developed countries in science, can earn relative competitive advantages in some new emerging or younger disciplines such as computer science by properly using catch-up strategy. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.