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Chinese Early-Career Researchers' Scholarly Communication Attitudes and Behaviours: Changes Observed in Year Two of a Longitudinal Study

Abstract:This paper presents research into the scholarly communication attitudes and behaviours of Chinese early-career researchers (ECRs). This research comes from year two of a projected three-year-long study of ECRs from seven countries (China, France, Malaysia, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US), for which semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with study participants. For the findings reported in this paper, fourteen Chinese ECRs from science and social science disciplines at six different universities were interviewed during the period from March to May 2017. The interview record was compared with the previous year's (2016) record to identify changes in interviewees' responses to a battery of questions. In addition, contextual data were obtained from the CVs of the ECRs. Our findings indicate that the scholarly communication attitudes and behaviours of Chinese ECRs have changed from year one to year two. We observed noteworthy changes in Chinese ECRs' attitudes and behaviours regarding open access publishing and peer review. As compared with data from 2016, the ECRs are more positive about open access journals but more negative about the peerreview system. Social media and online communities are now more frequently used as supplementary channels for scholarly communication, and WeChat is becoming very popular for Chinese ECRs. Authorship policies, the academic evaluation system, and the prevalent use of social media are the most important factors bringing about the changes we observed. What remains unchanged for the Chinese ECRs is the persistent pressure they feel to publish papers in select journals in order to advance their careers.