Peng Zhou: Chinese research not taken as seriously as papers from elsewhere

My new research suggests there is a stubborn pattern in academic publishing. My co-author and I examined some 8,000 articles published in the world’s most reputable economics journals to study citations, which are where academics cite previously published research in their papers. We found that papers whose lead authors had Chinese surnames received on average 14% fewer citations than comparable papers lead-written by those with non-Chinese names.

This supports similar findings from previous studies in chemistry and other natural sciences, suggesting that citation prejudice is a cross-disciplinary problem.

In reaching that conclusion, we put our raw findings through every test we could think of to rule out other explanations. Our first thought was that maybe Chinese-authored papers are more recently published on average than non-Chinese-authored papers, and therefore less cited. However the same citation gap holds for papers published in all years.

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