Comparison and evaluation of Chinese research performance in the field of bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is an emerging and rapidly evolving discipline. The bioinformatics literature is growing exponentially. This paper aims to provide an integrated bibliometric study of the knowledge base of Chinese research community, based on the bibliometric information in the field of bioinformatics from SCI-Expanded database during the period of 2000-2005. It is found that China is productive in bioinformatics as far as publication activity in international journals is concerned. For comparative purpose, the results are benchmarked against the findings from five other major nations in the field of bioinformatics: USA, UK, Germany, Japan and India. In terms of collaboration profile, the findings imply that the collaborative scope of China has gradually transcended boundaries of organizations, regions and nations as well. Finally, further analyses on the citation share and some surrogate scientometric indicators show that the publications of Chinese authors suffer from a lowest international visibility among the six countries. Strikingly, Japan has achieved most remarkable impact of publication when compared to research effort devoted to bioinformatics amongst the six countries. The policy implication of the findings lies in that Chinese scientific community needs much work on improving the research impact and pays more attention to strengthening the academic linkages between China and worldwide nations, particularly scientifically advanced countries.