GoKawiilThe Chinese Academy of Sciences is no longer publishing its journal ranking. Credit: Cheng Xin/Getty
The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing has stopped publishing its influential journal ranking, taking many researchers by surprise. The ranking has had a central role in research evaluation in the country for more than 20 years and its cessation leaves universities and academics uncertain about what happens next.
The CAS journal ranking, also called the CAS Journal Partition Table, was developed as a tool to help researchers assess journal quality. But over time, it began to influence hiring decisions, funding allocation and promotions.
“The official retirement of the CAS Journal Partition Table is indeed a crucial watershed moment for China’s scientific evaluation system,” says Xinchen Gu, an ecologist at the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou.
The ranking itself hasn’t disappeared, however. Last month, some of the team who used to run the CAS system published a new index, called Xinrui Scholar, run by a private organization. The new system uses the CAS ranking methodology.
Scholars and universities are unsure whether Xinrui Scholar, or any of the several other rankings that have emerged in the past few months, will become as influential as the CAS list. Others think its closure is an opportunity to move research evaluation beyond journal metrics.
Sudden closure
The cessation of the CAS ranking came with little fanfare. On 24 March, an organization called Xinrui Scholar announced that it has released a new journal ranking. Like the CAS ranking, Xinrui Scholar groups journals into discipline category and then divides those into four tiers mostly on the basis of article citation metrics.
This led to some confusion, says Nie, about whether CAS had simply rebranded its ranking into an independent system.
On 27 March, the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued a statement that it had stopped publishing the CAS ranking and declared that any journal ranking lists published by other institutions are unrelated.
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