Chinese Coal-in-Title Journal Articles in Chinese and English

摘要

China is now the leading nation for coal-in-the-title journal articles, overtaking the US.There has been a rapid rise in coal research within China as it “fuels” much of theelectricity generation expansion but also a coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemical industry.Research was performed to identify journals covering coal science research in theChinese language(s) and to identify the leading organizations (academic and companies)publishing coal research between 2000 and June of 2012. Unfortunately, locating Chineselanguage publications, related to coal science, was challenging due to very limitednavigation in English and lack of automation for citation collection common for Englishlanguage journals. Chinese language publications however tend to also include Englishtitles and often abstracts too. Furthermore some of the journals were also available inEnglish-language translations indicating a greater desire for an international presence incoal science. Leading journals for quantity of relevant publications were the Journal ofFuel Chemistry and Technology, Journal of China Coal Society and its associated Journalof Coal Science and Engineering, with other examples such as: Coal Conversion, BoilerTechnology, Journal of Engineering Thermophysics etc. Thus it appears that there arelimited coal science publications in the Chinese language with the greater volume beingin English publications.for English language publications articles containing “coal” in the title were identifiedusing the ISI Web of Knowledge selecting only the Web of Science (Science CitationIndex Expanded) database to identify the leading publishing organizations in China (2000to 2012 June). Those with > 100 papers during this period were The Chinese Academy ofSciences, China University of Mining Technology, Huazhong University of Science andTechnology, and Tsinghua University. Wordle word cloud plots were produced for theseand the other leading institutions to identify regional interests and specialties. There wasgreat interest in coal combustion for many of these institutions, often being he leadingsubject. In other universities there were obvious specializations in coal gasification, coalliquefaction, oxy-combustion, pollution control etc. Of the journal articles some 29% intotal were published in the leadings international journals Energy and Fuels (238 papers),Fuel (204), Fuel Processing Technology (121), and the International Journal of CoalGeology (115). This is slightly less than the 33% from US academic sources published inthese journals. The remaining 1653 articles from China are incredibly well dispersed among 404 other journals with only eight of those journals having more than 30 articles.The other US articles were similarly well dispersed (469 journals). Clearly Chinese coalscience has a significant number of coal publications in the leading coal science journals.The greatest frequency of international collaboration (up to 25% of the papers) wasbetween China and the U.S., Australia, Japan, and the UK.