How best to promote our research benchmarking system in China

（就加强成果宣传给国际科研评价同行的一点建议）

武夷山

2011年2月24日起草

First, make use of influential events in China and make presentations there.

For instance,  in the late November or early December each year, ISTIC would hold a grand news release conference. Journalists on behalf of major media, officials responsible for research performance evaluation in universities or research institutes, editors of top-notch academic journals would throng here to learn the newest rankings. The total audience is always over 1000. Usually, I make the news release in the morning. Then in the afternoon we arrange a few presentations on methodologies in performance evaluation, including university ranking. The past presenters include experts from Thomson Reuters, Elsevier, Springer and so on. Maybe our experts on benchmarking could deliver a lecture in this year’s news release conference.

Second, publish articles in China’s influential journals, magazines or national newspapers.

Both English papers and Chinese translations are OK, depending on the publication channels. For instance, I am the chief editor of Journal of the China Society for Scientific and Technical Information, a Chinese counterpart of JASIST. My journal is a Chinese language journal but is allowed to publish a few English papers. Most readers of this journals understand English. In terms of newspapers, The Science and Technology Daily and The Science Times are two good choices for promoting the Benchmark system. The former is affiliated to Ministry of Science and Technology. What is more, the editorial board of this newspaper shares the same building with ISTIC. The latter is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Personally, I have a lot of friends among the editors of these two daily newspapers. I could recommend articles introducing our benchmark system for publication in this or other influential newspapers or better, ask a journalist to interview the benchmark expert.

Third,  make best use of the Web. 

SHJT ranking is not very popular in China, partly because their indicator system is not sufficiently reasonable. For instance, the number of Nobel laureates is an indicator useless for most universities. It is like to intentionally design a very difficult problem in the term-end examination paper so that almost all students would fail to resolve it. SHJT’s popularity in the world is mainly due to its English website. Our benchmarking results could also be released in Chinese web sites and get a larger popularization effect. Chinese audience is very interested in university ranking or university evaluation. For instance, on Jan. 1 of this year, I uploaded my short article that makes a brief introduction about the report A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States onto my personal blog. So far it has attracted more than 2200 hits.