“Publish SCI papers or no degree”: practices of Chinese doctoral supervisors in response to the publication pressure on science students

Abstract

Publishing English papers in journals listed in Science Citation Index (SCI) has become a requirement for degree conferment for doctoral science students at many universities in China. The publication requirement engenders high pressure for doctoral students and their supervisors and shapes the politics of the relationship between the two parties. This is illustrated in the present paper which reports a study conducted at a prestigious university in east China. Focusing on the case of a research group in biochemistry led by an expert writer (the supervisor), the study aimed to find out, from the supervisor's perspective, what revising papers for the students means to him, and what the students learn as a result of their papers being revised. It is shown that the students depend on the supervisor to meet the publication requirement, and the supervisor believes an average student cannot write a publishable paper. The paper discusses the disempowering effect of the publication requirement, and concludes that there is a role for a course on academic English writing, and that the focus on “publishing SCI papers or no degree” should be shifted at the policy level and long-term planning should go into the training of EAP-qualified language professionals.

Keywords::

• write for publication
• publication requirement for doctoral students
• Chinese doctoral science students
• expert and novice writers
• training on academic writing and publication skills
• EAP in China

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the trust and support of the anonymous supervisor participant, and the insightful and constructive feedback from the two anonymous reviewers of this paper.

Notes

^1. Between 2007 and 2013, Feng published two review articles in two prestigious journals of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), two review articles in a well-known journal of the American Chemical Society (US), and a review article in the form of a book chapter. All the reviews were written on invitations from well-known researchers in their capacity either as editors of a book or guest editors of special issues of journals.

^2. In the following section of findings, the short quotations included within quotation marks and embedded in the text have been selected from interviews/conversations or email texts; while the longer extracts from interviews or emails are presented in blocks with the information of date. Unless otherwise indicated, the quotations have been translated from Chinese by myself.

^3. Feng was using a Chinese idiom: Qiaofu nan wei wumizhicui (Even the cleverest wife cannot cook a meal without rice).

^4. “Academic English Writing” is a commonly used course title in Chinese universities where such a course is present. A search on the term in its Chinese equivalent xueshu yingyu xiezuo throws up about 9,880,000 hits on http://www.baidu.com (the largest Chinese-medium Internet search engine) in mid-September 2014. This exorbitantly high number of hits is perhaps understandable, given the widespread importance of “academic English writing” in contemporary Chinese academia, and with the booming industry of language editing and training in academic English writing (Li, 2014b), and noticeably, with the seemingly unstoppable underground practices of buying papers and ghostwriting in Chinese science (Hvistendahl, 2013).