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A bibliometric study of China’s science and technology policies: 1949–2010

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Abstract

This paper uses a bibliometric analysis method to probe into the evolution of China’s science and technology policies from 1949 to 2010, and the roles of core government agencies in policy-making. We obtained 4,707 Chinese S&T policies from GDIS, a Chinese public policy database provided by Tsinghua University. Co-word analysis and network analysis were applied in mapping the topics of S&T policies and collaboration among the agencies, while citation analysis was applied to assess the influence of S&T policies. Findings include: first, the focus of Chinese S&T policies is mainly on applied research and industrialization, rather than basic research; second, more and more government agencies are involved in making S&T policies, but collaboration efforts are not significantly increasing; last but not least, the influence of different S&T policies is determined by the administrative ranking of the policy-making agencies responsible for drafting those policies.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers 71233005, 71173184, and 71203193). We also thank Ms. Ting Xia for helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Cui Huang, Jun Su, Xuanting Ye & Zhang Li

  2. Lab of Logistics Management and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, 100044, China

    Xiang Xie

  3. Technology Policy and Assessment Centre, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Alan Porter

  4. Department of Information Resource Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Jiang Li

Authors
  1. Cui Huang
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  2. Jun Su
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  3. Xiang Xie
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  4. Xuanting Ye
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  5. Zhang Li
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  6. Alan Porter
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  7. Jiang Li
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Correspondence to Jiang Li.

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Huang, C., Su, J., Xie, X. et al. A bibliometric study of China’s science and technology policies: 1949–2010. Scientometrics 102, 1521–1539 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1406-4

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