Every week, Nature China's editors select some of the best recently published research from across the scientific and medical literature, and provide short easy-to-understand summaries of the results
In a move to raise the profile of the best scientific research published in mainland China and Hong Kong, Nature Publishing with the support of AstraZeneca held events in Beijing and Shanghai last week to celebrate the official launch of the new web-based publication Nature China.
The website, which has a mirror site in China hosted by Tsinghua University, was officially launched at two one-day symposia on How to Get Published in Nature Journals in Beijing and Shanghai on Saturday 9 June and Monday 11 June, respectively.
"This new member of the Nature family will increase the international profile of research articles from China in scientific literature as well as aid mutual communications between Chinese scientists," says Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature who gave presentations at the two events.
According to results presented at the symposia by David Swinbanks, NPG publishing director for the Asia-Pacific region, in 2006, scientists from mainland China and Hong Kong published more than 80,000 scientific papers that were indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) in the United States.
This output comes close to matching the annual outputs of Japan and the United Kingdom and the annual rise in the number of manuscripts from China is so dramatic that China will soon overtake Japan and the United Kingdom in the quantity of published scientific research.
Additional data from ISI indicates that the number of high impact papers from China with large numbers of citations are also increasing rapidly in number year on year.
The website also has the facility for users to recommend research articles for highlighting and to vote on those recommendations.
Furthermore, the website has an archive of highlights of 154 research articles published in top scientific journals since 2000 and in the case of research articles highlighted from Nature journals the original full text scientific articles are made freely available to registered users of Nature China.
"An increasing number of Chinese scientists have published their research in top international journals," said Xiaolin Zhang, Head of the Innovation Center China, an R+D center that AstraZeneca recently set up in Shanghai.
"AstraZeneca is committed to being 'in China for China'.
"Sponsoring the Nature China website is a good example of our efforts to strengthen collaborations with China's scientific community and further improve their discovery capability".
Jointly organised by NPG, Science Times, ScienceNet, and SciDevNet, and sponsored by AstraZeneca, the event in Beijing on "How to get published in Nature Journals" attracted nearly 300 leading and promising scientists.
A similar event on the same topic sponsored by AstraZeneca was also held in Shanghai on June 11 at the Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences.
This event was jointly organised by NPG, the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (SIBS) and the editorial team of Cell Research, China's highest impact science journal published by SIBS in partnership ! with NPG, and attracted 150 leading researchers from the region.
