Is There a Clubbing Effect Underlying Chinese Research Citation Increases?

There is increasing evidence that citations to Chinese research publications are rising sharply. A series of reasons have been highlighted in previous studies. This research explores another possibility—whether there is a “clubbing ” effect in China’s surge in research cita-tions, in which a higher rate of internal citing takes place among influential Chinese researchers. Focusing on the most highly cited research articles in nanotechnology, we find that a larger proportion of Chinese nanotechnol-ogy research citations are localized within individual, institutional, and national networks within China. Both descriptive and statistical tests suggest that highly cited Chinese papers are more likely than similar U.S. papers to receive internal and localized citations. Tentative explanations and policy implications are discussed