Historical development and global standings: Charting the cartography of humanities and social sciences research in East Asia Open Access

https://www.webofscience.com/api/gateway/wos/peer-review/10.1162/qss_a_00356

This article provides a broad and in-depth bibliometric picture of humanities and social sciences (HSS) research in East Asia, with reference to a few globally leading systems that are traditionally considered as the center of world HSS research, according to the world system theory (Wallerstein, 2004). East Asia research systems include those of Japan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, South Korea, and Taiwan¹. Using Web of Science-Incites data, it provides a historical and contemporary picture of the drastic growth of HSS research in East Asia and its global standings, in terms of quantity, global connectivity, quality, and impact.

In the era marked by globalization, the global research system is expanding, with many studies pointing out the trends of multipolarization and pluralization (e.g., Oldac & Yang, 2023; Wagner, 2018). The global research system is now characterized by growing global connectivity in international research collaboration (Aksnes & Sivertsen, 2023), knowledge sharing (Marginson, 2022), and researcher mobility (Gu, Pan et al., 2024). Such increasing global connectivity is challenging the traditional hierarchies of the global research system, described as a center-periphery continuum in the world system theory and the Global North/South divisions (Wallerstein, 2004). Many systems in the Global South are rapidly enhancing their research capacity through active engagement in international collaboration and increasing Research and Development (R&D) investment. The rise of East Asian research is a distinctive example. East Asian research systems, including those of Hong Kong, Mainland China, South Korea, and Taiwan, only took off in the 1990s, and all of them have become important global research powers today (Marginson, 2022). The only exception is Japan, which developed a strong research system at an earlier time and has continued to be an important global research power ever since.

Housing around 1.6 billion people, East Asia makes up about 20% of the global population as of 2022 (World Bank, 2022). Mainland China and Japan are the world’s second- and third- largest economies. Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan are often referred to as Asia’s Four Little Dragons because of their dramatic economic growth in the 1970s to 1990s. In the past three to four decades, East Asian governments and societies have demonstrated strong commitments to fostering R&D by investing heavily in both research infrastructure and human capital (Marini & Yang, 2021; Shin & Kehm, 2013). Except for Hong Kong, whose Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D (GERD) only took up 0.97% of the GDP in 2021, this value for all other systems ranged between 2.43% (Mainland China) and 4.93% (South Korea) (Table 1). For comparison, the world average for the year was 1.93%. Furthermore, the value of GERD per capita in current purchasing power parity dollars (PPP$) for Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan was $1,410, $2,311.7, and $2369.9 in 2021, much higher than the world average of $292.56 in 2018. The value for Hong Kong ($483.1) and Mainland China ($304) was only slightly higher than the world average, which may be related to the rather low overall investment in R&D in the case of Hong Kong and the large population in the case of Mainland China. Nonetheless, it is evident that despite the difference in per capita R&D resources in East Asia, the region is overall committed to R&D and this commitment has laid solid foundations for the rise of research in the region.

While the overall research capacity of East Asia has been widely acknowledged and studied, many scholars claim that the development of East Asian research is unbalanced, with phenomenal achievements in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research but much slower progress in HSS research (Altbach, 2013; see more in Section 2). Indeed, compared with STEM research, the East Asian HSS may face more and bigger challenges in climbing the ladders in the global research system. Unlike natural sciences research, which seeks to discover causal natural laws, HSS research aims to “clarify the self-explanations of [human] actors and to articulate the norms that are essential to those explanations” (Taylor, 1985, p. 94). As a result, HSS research is closely entangled with local language and culture. Non-Anglophone and more widely non-Euro-American HSS researchers may constantly encounter and struggle with difficulties in connecting local and global knowledge in research, the need to speak and write in the global academic language English, and the need to follow global norms of scholarship (Li & Yang, 2020; Shahjahan, Ramirez, & Andreotti, 2017).

The distinct nature of STEM and HSS research and the aforementioned extra challenges necessitate independent investigations into East Asian HSS research. As Section 2, on the existing literature, will show, there has been much less attention paid to HSS research in the region, compared to the large volume of studies on STEM. Moreover, among the studies on East Asian HSS research, most have employed a qualitative approach or focused on a specific system/discipline, without comprehensive bibliometric analyses that look into East Asian HSS research as a whole. As a result, the state of the art of East Asian HSS research in the global system and how it has historically developed in the past two decades remains largely unknown.

The current research gap calls for the creation of a comprehensive and historical overview of East Asian HSS research. This can be achieved through a bibliometric analysis. Accordingly, using bibliometric data from Web of Science-Incites, we aim to decipher the historical trends and the current state of HSS research outputs published by East Asian research systems. The exploration primarily focuses on four aspects—the quantity, quality, impact, and global connectivity of East Asian HSS research—which collectively provide a well-rounded understanding of the field. Specifically, we ask the following research questions:

What is the historical and current state of the research output of East Asian HSS between 2000 and 2023, in terms of

• (a) 

  the quantity, quality, and research impact of the output, reflected by the number, research outlets, and citation patterns of the output by research area, document type and historical trend?

• (b) 

  the global connectivity, reflected by international and local research coauthorship of the output?

Meanwhile, the article also considers a few globally leading systems (see Section 3) as references in discussing the global standings of the East Asian HSS research.

The rise of East Asian research in the last three decades has been widely acknowledged and studied (Hien, 2010; Yang, 2019). Drawing on the university performance in global university rankings, Altbach (2013) shows the dramatic academic growth in East Asia in the 21st century, particularly considering the high-quality universities in Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan, and the then rapidly developing Mainland Chinese universities. Previous studies have found that China has overtaken the United States as the largest SCI-indexed research articles producer since 2018 (Zhu & Liu, 2020). Marginson (2022) argues that Mainland China is now the number two science system in the world, after only the United States, when considering various databases and metrics. Compared to Mainland China, other East Asian systems started their modern research and higher education at an earlier time. Japan had its drastic growth in research between the 1960s and 1990s (Bartholomew, 1989) and is now the sixth largest producer of Scopus-indexed scientific papers worldwide (NSB, 2023, Figure PBS-2). Another East Asian top 10 producer of such papers is South Korea, ranked ninth in 2023.

However, in contrast to the overwhelming focus on East Asian research as a whole or on STEM, there has been much less attention to HSS research in the region. Most studies tend to exclude HSS research in their bibliometric analysis (e.g., Leydesdorff & Wagner, 2008; Marginson, 2022). The relatively small number of studies that consider HSS research in East Asia have explored internationalization policies in HSS research (Gong, 2023), research agenda-setting (Horta, Jung et al., 2019), and the publishing strategies of HSS researchers (Lu, 2019).

Regarding analyses of East Asian HSS research outputs, there are only sporadic studies focusing on specific HSS disciplines or a particular East Asian system. Studies that examine HSS research in more than one East Asian system usually choose to focus on one discipline. Examples include Liu, Xu, and Li (2015), which looks into management publications in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau; Wu and Chen (2018) on the internationalization of medical humanities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China; and Dufoix and Chen (2021) on sociological research in Asia. For research that centers on a specific East Asian system, China has arguably received the most attention. For example, Ma, Li, and Chen (2014) explore the collaboration patterns of China’s HSS research outputs; and Liu, Hu et al. (2015), Zhang, Shang et al. (2021), and Gong (2023) examine the internationalization of China’s social sciences research during different periods, using evidence from bibliometric analyses of SSCI publications. In addition, acknowledging the gaps between publishing in English—as the lingua franca of global academia—and in local languages, a handful of studies have investigated HSS scholars’ language preferences in publishing (Flowerdew & Li, 2009), localization of knowledge in HSS research (Shin, Huang, & Lee, 2021), and the concentration and dispersion phenomenon in locally published HSS research (compared with internationally published research) (Yu & Shu, 2023).

Despite the previous studies that have explored various aspects of East Asian HSS research, to the best of our knowledge there has been no comprehensive bibliometric assessment of HSS research in East Asia. Nonetheless, even with a lack of comprehensive bibliometric assessments, there is a general assumption that East Asian HSS research lags behind and remains the “lowland” of East Asian research (Gao & Zheng, 2020). It is widely pointed out that there exist large disparities across disciplines in the rise of East Asian research, and the increase in the number and citation number of English papers produced in East Asia primarily comes from STEM. According to the NSB (2023, Table SPB-16, SPB-17), the percentage of social sciences publications in the overall scientific publications was 2.1 for Japan, 1.5 for Mainland China, 2.3 for South Korea, and 3.4 in Taiwan in 2022, compared to 8.5 in the United States and 7.6 in EU-27 countries. Altbach (2013, p. 149) calls HSS in Asia “endangered species” and argues that “the humanities and to a lesser extent the social sciences are in crisis in many East Asian universities.” Chen, Ren et al. (2022, p. 127) refers to social sciences in China as “the other side of the coin under the background of skyrocketing of Chinese national science papers,” as the efficiency of publication of social science papers in China consistently decreased between 2009 and 2018.

Importantly, without a comprehensive bibliometric assessment of East Asian HSS research, the validity of existing assumptions that portray East Asian HSS research as lagging behind, or as a “lowland,” remains questionable. As the findings of this article will demonstrate, contrary to these “lowland” assumptions, East Asian HSS has seen remarkable growth over the past two decades, mirroring the trajectory of their STEM counterparts. Furthermore, it is even reasonable to argue that East Asian HSS has emerged as a significant and leading force on the global stage, in terms of its quantity, networks, quality, and global impact.

Bibliometric analysis is an important way to evaluate and create broad pictures of research output in certain locations and research fields, and over time (Birkle, Pendlebury et al., 2020). Web of Science (WoS), which is a publisher-independent global data set, is widely used in conducting bibliometric analyses. This study uses the WoS tool InCites to collect and analyze bibliometric data of East Asian HSS research outputs published between 2000 and 2023. The data was retrieved from InCites on February 29, 2024. WoS-InCites is an analytical tool that has access to WoS data sets and contains bibliometric indicators aggregated from WoS researchers, organizations, and countries/regions (Chankseliani, Lovakov, & Pislyakov, 2021). This study analyzes all articles and review articles published in journals indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), which are all available through InCites. Publications in journals indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) are not included in this study because their quality and impact are relatively unstable over time.

Notably, the bias of language coverage in the WoS database as documented in some previous studies (e.g., Liu, 2017) inevitably excludes a large number of East Asian HSS research outputs published in local languages. Among the 471,043 HSS articles and reviews produced by East Asia in SCIE, SSCI, and A&HCI during 2000–2023, about 98.1% were published in English, 0.9% in Japanese, 0.4% in Korean, 0.3% in Chinese, and 0.3% in other languages. However, acknowledging the potential limitations the exclusion may cause, we made the decision to use the WoS database for the following considerations. First, the WoS database is a major database and one of the largest research databases globally, and is widely used in conducting bibliometric analyses. Second, whether research output is indexed in WoS is greatly emphasized in East Asian research systems, which have encouraged scholars to publish in WoS-indexed research outlets (Gao & Zheng, 2020). Third, although WoS is often criticized for its language exclusivity, as the vast majority of its research items are in English, such exclusivity may not be a significant problem for this study. This is because this study focuses on the global standing and impact of East Asian research outputs, and local language publications may have a limited global outreach.

The analysis includes all documents classified as Articles or Reviews in InCites. Articles are journal articles reporting research on new and original works. Reviews are detailed and critical review articles of published research. While books are an important publishing medium in HSS, especially in the humanities, unfortunately, no database covers books and monographs as systematically and exhaustively as WoS does for journal articles. Therefore, we exclude books, book chapters, book reviews, and other types of documents from the analysis, limiting the analysis to journal articles and review articles. In defining HSS research, this study follows the OECD categories of subjects. Humanities include History & Archaeology, Languages & Literature, Philosophy, Ethics & Religion, Arts, and Other Humanities. Social sciences include Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Economics & Business, Education, Sociology, Law, Political Science, Social & Economic Geography, Media & Communications, and Other Social Sciences (OECD, 2015). This category is also available in the WoS-InCites tool.

In particular, the analysis consists of four major parts, respectively demonstrating the quantity, global connectivity, quality, and global impact of HSS research outputs in East Asia. The first part, on quantity, includes an investigation of the historical trend and current state of the overall quantity of East Asian HSS research output between 2000 and 2023, and provides a more detailed picture by looking into the state of different research areas. The second part centers on the quality of East Asian HSS research by considering the journal quality (the quartile rankings of the journal) for social sciences articles. It should be noted that quartile rankings are not provided for A&HCI indexed journals in WoS. For journals that have multiple quartile rankings in different research fields, we use the highest one. The third part, on global impact, relies on the number and percentage of documents in top 1% and 10% highly cited outputs and the Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) values provided by the InCites tool. The fourth part pays attention to the global connectivity in East Asian HSS research, including the proportions of international collaborations and domestic collaborations, major collaborators’ country/region location and East Asian researchers’ roles in research (e.g., as the first or corresponding author, etc.).

We shall underline that, in addition to the East Asian systems, the analysis also includes a few other globally leading systems in HSS, including the United States, the United Kingdom (including England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales), Germany, Canada, Australia, Spain, Netherlands, France, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland, Israel, South Africa, and Norway. These systems are included because they, together with the examined East Asian systems, constitute the 20 largest producers of HSS research output worldwide during 2000 to 2023. The inclusion of these systems helps to delineate a global picture of HSS research and demonstrate the global standing of East Asian HSS research.

All five of the East Asian research systems rank among the global top 20 producers of HSS outputs published between 2000 and 2023 (Figure 1). Taken together, the five systems published 10.46% of all WoS articles and reviews in HSS during 2000–2023 (471,043 publications out of a global total of 4,505,223). Mainland China published 252,061 HSS papers during this period, ranked 6th globally. It was followed by Japan (14th, 68,852), South Korea (15th, 64,783), Hong Kong (16th, 60,927), and Taiwan (19th, 57,352).

A closer look at Figure 1 reveals a possible clustering of global HSS systems based on the number of publications during 2000–2023. The United States leads the world with 1,698,418 (37.7% of the global total) papers published. The United Kingdom comes second, with more than 600,000 published papers (641,501, 14.24% of the global total). Germany, Canada, Australia, and Mainland China seem to have a similar range of publications, between 200,000 and 300,000 publications. Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Italy all have published outputs in the range of 100,000 and 200,000. The 10 systems from Sweden to Norway are in the range of 50,000 and 100,000 published papers. The four East Asian systems, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, all sit in this range.

When it comes to the historical trend, East Asia has seen a tremendous increase in the number of HSS publications over time. In 2000, HSS research output produced in this region constituted only 4% of the global total. After 2 decades of development, in 2023, the percentage increased to 22.3% (56,371 articles and reviews out of a global total of 253,045). Figure 2 compares the research output in 2023 to the research output in 2000. Mainland China has the highest growth rate (10,123%). A more detailed look at the historical development illustrates China’s steep growth in international HSS publications, especially after 2010 (Figure 3). Mainland China has overtaken Germany as the world’s third largest HSS paper-producing country since 2019, and surpassed the United Kingdom as the second largest in 2022. In 2023, China published 16.7% of the total global HSS WoS output, and the figures were 28.3% and 12.2% for the United States and the United Kingdom respectively.

The total number of HSS publications in Japan during 2000–2023 is the second highest in East Asia. However, its rate of increase has been the lowest in the region. In 2023, Japan published 4,076 WoS-indexed HSS papers, which is 307% of the number in 2000. This ratio is relatively low compared to other global top 20 producers (Figure 2). The country’s modest development in HSS over the past two decades could be related to its earlier development in scientific research since the 1950s (Nguyen & Choung, 2020). Before 2008, Japan had been the largest international publication producer in East Asian HSS. It was surpassed by Mainland China in 2008, by South Korea in 2015, and by Hong Kong in 2020 (Figure 3). Since 2020, Japan has been the fourth largest HSS contributor in East Asia in terms of the number of WoS-indexed papers published each year, above only Taiwan, while the number of researchers in Hong Kong and Taiwan is much smaller than that of Japan (Table 1).

South Korea has experienced rapid growth. Its research output in 2023, expressed as a proportion of output in 2000, is 1,698%, ranking second among the global top 20 producers (Figure 2). As mentioned earlier, South Korea has surpassed Japan to be the second largest East Asian producer of WoS-indexed HSS papers since 2015. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the volume of HSS international publications from South Korea is still relatively small, with only 5,671 papers (2.2% of the global total) published in 2023.

The growth rate of HSS publications in Hong Kong and Taiwan is relatively high among the top 20 producers. Their research outputs in 2023 are respectively 694% and 773% of those in 2000. The ratio is similar to that of Norway, Italy, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland (Figure 2). Another trend that should be noted is that the numbers of HSS publications in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany have seen an obvious decline since 2020, which may be due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decline for Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea is more moderate. By contrast, Mainland China still shows an upward trend, albeit with a slight pullback in 2023 (Figure 3). Moreover, the United States has shown a significant decline in the proportion of HSS publications accounting for the global total, from 51.9% in 2000 to 28.3% in 2023. All these indicate a multipolar trend in global HSS research.

When it comes to the number of publications by research area, the five East Asian systems display certain similar patterns. The percentage of publications in the social sciences far exceeds that in the humanities in all five systems. During 2000–2023, East Asia published 471,043 WoS-indexed HSS papers, of which 437,844 (93%) were in the social sciences while only 54,028 (11%) were in the humanities. The combination of the two ratios is larger than 1 because interdisciplinary papers are multiply counted in different areas by the InCites tool. The dominance of social science publications may be explained by two reasons. First, the publication volume of A&HCI is smaller than that of SCIE and SSCI and has stayed stagnant over the last two decades, while the publication volumes of SCIE and SSCI have been growing continuously and obviously (Liu, Ni, & Hu, 2024). Second, humanities generally rely more on local languages and culture and are less internationalized than social sciences. East Asian scholars in the humanities tend to publish in local journals (which usually are not indexed in WoS) more than scholars in the social sciences.

A more nuanced picture emerges when examining the output distribution by subresearch area (Figure S1, Supplementary material). Economics & Business, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, and Social & Economic Geography are the top three areas in terms of the number of WoS publications in the five East Asian systems (except Social & Economic Geography in Taiwan, ranking fourth among all areas in Taiwan). Economics & Business is the area with the largest number/percentage of publications in all five systems, accounting for 42%, 32%, 37%, 36%, and 44% of the total HSS outputs in Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan respectively. This can be attributed to the research development strategy in East Asia, emphasizing more on “hard” disciplines than “soft” disciplines and thus focusing more on the relatively “harder” area of Economics & Business among all HSS areas (Nguyen & Choung, 2020).

Psychology & Cognitive Sciences and Social & Economic Geography are the areas with the second or third highest number/percentage of articles in East Asian systems (Figure S1, Supplementary material). South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have roughly similar shares of publications in the two fields, accounting for 13% to 19% of the total. Mainland China published more articles in Social & Economic Geography (25%) than in Psychology & Cognitive Sciences (17%), while Japan published more in Psychology & Cognitive Sciences (27%) than Social & Economic Geography (17%). Education is a key area of publication in Hong Kong and Taiwan, accounting for 12% and 14% of the total publications in their respective systems, which are noticeably higher than Education in other systems. South Korea published 7% of articles in Education. The ratios are 6% for educational papers in Japan and 5% in Mainland China.

In Sociology, Hong Kong (10%), Japan (9%), and South Korea (7%) published a larger proportion of publications than in most of the other areas. Both Mainland China and Taiwan published 5% of outputs in Sociology, slightly higher than in most of the other areas. Compared to other social science areas, East Asia has a modest percentage of publications in Media & Communications (Figure S1, Supplementary material). Yet Media & Communications is one of the best-performing areas in East Asia in terms of the global rank of the number of papers in each area. Mainland China, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan ranked 4th, 9th, 12th, and 13th in the world respectively in terms of their number of publications in Media & Communications. Again, in terms of the global rank of the number of publications in each area, Arts is a relatively better ranked area among all HSS areas in South Korea (11th) and Japan (16th), as well as Languages & Literature in Japan (13th) and Law in Hong Kong (15th).

Generally speaking, East Asia still lags behind in the fields of History, Philosophy, Ethics & Religion, Political Science, and Law, in the sense that their number of WoS publications is significantly lower than that in other HSS areas and that in other global leading HSS systems. For example, in Philosophy and Ethics & Religion, the number of publications of Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan ranks 12th, 29th, 32nd, 28th, and 31st globally respectively. As shown in Figure S1 (Supplementary material), Japan has a relatively higher share of publications in History (5%) than other East Asia systems. However, its global rank (23rd) is not comparable with that of its social science areas (e.g., Psychology ranking, 11th; Economics & Business, 14th). All these suggest that the underrepresentation of East Asia in global knowledge systems still lingers in the humanities and certain classic social science disciplines.

We analyze the quality of HSS outputs indexed in SSCI and SCIE through the quartile ranking² of journals in which outputs are published. However, such analysis is not possible for the humanities, as quartile rankings are not provided for A&HCI indexed journals. Figure 4 illustrates the proportions of publications in Q1–Q4 journals of global top 20 HSS producers. Previous studies have found that far more than 25% of papers are published in Q1 journals and far fewer than 25% of papers are published in Q4 journals, because journals in Q1 have more issues and publish more articles each year (Liu, Hu, & Gu, 2016). Therefore, we add a global baseline for all HSS articles and reviews published during 2000–2023 in Figure 4. The results show that Hong Kong and Mainland China perform obviously better than the global baseline, while Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea are slightly below the baseline in terms of the proportions of outputs published in Q1 and Q2 journals. Hong Kong ranks 3rd globally in terms of the proportion of Q1 publications (44%), after only the Netherlands and Switzerland, and above the United States and the United Kingdom. Mainland China, with 39% of Q1 publications, is in the middle of the range (ranks 12th) compared to other global top 20 systems. However, the percentage of Q2 publications from Mainland China (36%) is significantly higher than other systems. When calculating the sum of the proportions of publications in Q1 and Q2 journals, Mainland China ranks second globally, with about 75%, after only Switzerland (76%). Mainland China and Hong Kong have a low percentage of Q4 publications, both at 10%. Taiwan’s performance is very similar to the global baseline, with 36% Q1 publications and 30% Q2 publications, which are close to the proportions of Australia. The quality of social science publications in Japan and South Korea is that of the two weakest in global top 20 systems. Japan (19%) and South Korea (17%) have obviously higher proportions of publications in Q4 journals than other systems. The Q1–Q4 publications distribution of the two countries is similar to that of Spain, but significantly better than South Africa.

A more nuanced picture of the distribution of papers in quartile rankings can be observed when considering different research areas (Figure S2, Supplementary material). In Economics & Business, the East Asian systems (except Japan) have a larger proportion of publications in Q1 journals than in social sciences taken together. Hong Kong (50%) and Mainland China (45%) have particularly large proportions of Economics & Business publications in Q1 journals while Japan has the smallest percentage of Economics & Business Q1 publications (29%) and the largest ratio of Q4 publications (21%) in East Asia.

In Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan have larger proportions of Q1 publications than in social sciences taken together. Hong Kong (44%) has the largest share of Q1 publications while Japan (34%) has the smallest. In Social & Economic Geography, Hong Kong (55%) also produces the largest proportion of top-quality publications in Q1 journals. Japan performs exceptionally well in Social & Economic Geography than in other areas, having 40% of publications in Q1 journals. South Korea has the lowest percentage of Q1 publications (24%) in Social & Economic Geography, but it has the largest proportion of Q2 publications (57%).

As introduced in Section 4.1, Taiwan has produced a substantial proportion of publications in Education. These educational publications from Taiwan are also of good quality, with 44% of outputs published in Q1 journals. Japan has a high percentage of Q1 publications in Education (40%), obviously higher than its performance in all areas (31%). Hong Kong (38%) and Mainland China (37%) have lower ratios of Q1 publications in Education than in social sciences as a whole. South Korea has the lowest ratio of Q1 publications (32%) and the highest ratio of Q4 publications (22%) in Education among all East Asian systems.

In Sociology, Mainland China (40%) has published the largest proportion of Q1 publications among East Asian systems while Taiwan (30%) produced the lowest proportion. Hong Kong has an obvious lower percentage of Q1 publications in Sociology (35%) than in social sciences taken together (44%). Japan and South Korea have the same proportion (31%) of Q1 publications in Education, equal to this number for social sciences in total, whereas Japan has an obviously high percentage of Q4 publications in Sociology (24%).

It seems that the performance of East Asia on publication quality is consistent with its performance on publication quantity. In areas where their numbers of publications are large, the quality of these publications is also high (such as Economics & Business in four systems except Japan, and Education in Taiwan). Conversely, in areas where their quantity of publications is limited, the quality of the publications is also weak. As introduced in Section 4.1, East Asian systems are important contributors in Media & Communications in terms of quantity. Their performances in quality are also exceptionally good. All the five systems have published an obviously larger proportion of Q1 outputs in Media & Communications than in all areas, with the proportions being 48% (for both Hong Kong and Mainland China), 47% (South Korea), 46% (Taiwan), and 39% (Japan). All five systems have produced a small number/percentage of WoS publications in Law (Figure S1, Supplementary material). The quality of these publications in Law is also the weakest. The proportions of Q1 publications in Law are only 17% (Mainland China, Japan, and South Korea), 16% (Hong Kong), and 12% (Taiwan). Accordingly, significantly larger proportions of Law articles are published in Q4 journals, being 31% in Mainland China, 26% in Japan and South Korea, 36% in Hong Kong, and 32% in Taiwan. Similarly, East Asia has published a relatively small number of publications in Political Science. Their publication quality in Political Science is also saliently lower than that in other areas, though better than in Law (Figure S2, Supplementary material).

We use citation data to measure the impact of research output. As introduced in Section 3, two indicators in the InCites database are used: the proportion of publications in the top 10% and top 1% most cited publications, and the Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI). Both indicators are normalized by research area, year of publication, and document type (Chankseliani et al., 2021).

Figure 5 illustrates the proportions of outputs in the top 10% and top 1% most cited publications published by global top 20 HSS producers during 2000–2023. Hong Kong and Mainland China perform exceptionally well. The two systems have 20.12% (Hong Kong) and 18.41% (Mainland China) publications in the top 10%, ranking 2nd and 3rd among global top 20 HSS producers, after only the Netherlands (20.15%). If we turn to look at the top 1% publications, Mainland China ranks first with 2.77% publications, followed by Hong Kong (2.69%) ranking second. Among the 2.77% (i.e., 6,982 papers) top 1% most cited papers produced by Mainland China, 57% were published in or after 2020, while the proportion for the global total was 37%. This shows, on the one hand, the increase in the international impact of China’s HSS research in the last five years, which deserves further in-depth studies. On the other hand, the impact of these relatively recent studies has yet to be tested over a longer period, considering the time lag between the effect produced and the papers being published in HSS research (Reale, Avramov et al., 2018). Although they are highly cited papers for now, their numbers of times being cited are still relatively small, due to their recent date of publication, with most of the items being cited less than 100 times.

Taiwan and South Korea sit in the lower middle range among global top HSS producers. Taiwan has published 13.85% (ranking 14th) outputs in the top 10% and 1.58% (ranking 15th) in the top 1%. It is followed by South Korea, having 13.31% outputs in the top 10% and 1.58% in the top 1%. The proportions of Taiwan and South Korea’s highly cited papers are lower than most of the Global Northern systems, including the United States (16.22% and 2.03%), the United Kingdom (15.82% and 1.89%), Australia (15.45% and 1.79%), and Italy (15.1% and 1.77%), but are close to or higher than Germany (14.63%, 1.69%), France (12.31% and 1.68%), and Spain (12.23% and 1.39%). Japan ranks last among the global top 20 HSS producers, with only 9.24% outputs in the top 10% and 1.04% in the top 1%.

Another indicator of impact used in this study is the CNCI, which is the citations per paper that are normalized by research area, year of publication, and document type. All the East Asian systems have CNCI values above the world average of 1, with the exception of Japan (Figure 6). Congruent with their performance in the proportions of outputs in the top 10% and the top 1%, Hong Kong and Mainland China have higher CNCI values, Taiwan and South Korea sit in the lower middle, and Japan has the lowest value. Hong Kong has the highest CNCI value (1.52) among all of the global top 20 HSS producers. Mainland China ranks third with a value of 1.44, after only Hong Kong and the Netherlands (1.51). The CNCI value of Taiwan is 1.13, which is close to Germany (1.14), lower than countries including Norway (1.32), the United States (1.24), Belgium (1.24), and Australia (1.19), but higher than Italy (1.12). South Korea has the same CNCI value as Israel (1.07), lower than Taiwan and Italy, but higher than France (0.99), Spain (0.97), and South Africa (0.9). Japan has the lowest CNCI value (0.8) among the global top 20 HSS systems.

Figure 7 shows the trends of the CNCI values of East Asian systems during 2000–2023. Hong Kong has kept the highest value in East Asia most of the time, exhibiting an upward trend with occasional falls. Mainland China has seen a steady increase, from 0.9 in 2000 to 1.54 in 2023. The starkest rise over the past two decades happened in Taiwan from 2001 to 2005, where the CNCI value increased from 0.82 in 2000 to 1.66 in 2005. Nevertheless, it had decreased sharply since 2005, until reaching the bottom at 0.95 in 2011, from when it increased steadily to 1.36 in 2023. South Korea has kept a relatively stable CNCI value over the years, slightly higher than the world average. Japan’s CNCI value has been the lowest in East Asia (consistently below the world average of 1), but it has shown an upward trend, increasing from 0.7 in 2000 to 0.92 in 2023.

Regarding the CNCI by research area, it seems that East Asia tend to perform better in research areas where they publish larger numbers of publications. As presented in Section 4.1, Economics & Business and Social & Economic Geography are two areas with the largest number of publications in East Asia. The region also has relatively high CNCI values in these two areas 0028Figure S3). In Economics & Business, Hong Kong has the highest value (1.72) in East Asia, followed by Mainland China (1.62), South Korea (1.19), Taiwan (1.17), and Japan (0.69). In Social & Economic Geography, Mainland China performs the best (1.63), followed by Hong Kong (1.45), Taiwan (1.15), Japan (0.96), and South Korea (0.93).

As discussed in Sections 4.1 and 4.2, East Asia is a globally important contributor in Media & Communications in terms of quantity and quality. The region also performs quite well in this area in terms of impact, with a CNCI value of 1.79 (Hong Kong), 1.73 (Taiwan), 1.43 (South Korea), and 1.38 (Mainland China) (Figure S3, Supplementary material). Education is a research area with relatively large numbers of outputs in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The CNCI values of Hong Kong and Taiwan in Education have also been relatively high, being 1.5 and 1.37 respectively. East Asia published a small number of outputs in Law and Political Science. Their CNCI values in Law and Political Science are the lowest of all areas, with all five East Asian systems below the world average of 1.

However, Figures S1 and S3 (Supplementary material) also indicate some negative associations between the quantity and the impact. Across East Asia, the highest CNCI values come from Languages & Literature. Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea have the highest CNCI value in Languages & Literature out of all areas, being 2.51, 1.54, and 1.41 respectively. However, the region (except Japan) only has a relatively small percentage/number of publications in this area. As discussed in Section 4.1, East Asia is under-represented in Philosophy and Ethics & Religion in terms of quantity. Nevertheless, the citation impact of East Asian publications in this area is surprisingly good, with the CNCI values being 1.52 (Hong Kong), 1.49 (Mainland China), 1.23 (South Korea), and 1.14 (Taiwan).

In Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, East Asia has published a large number of outputs. Yet the impact of outputs in Psychology based on CNCI is relatively limited, with the values being 1.43 (Hong Kong), 1.12 (Mainland China), 1.03 (Taiwan), and 0.78 (Japan), all lower than their values in all areas taken together. Similarly, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea have published a relatively substantial percentage of publications in Sociology. But their performance regarding impact is barely satisfactory, with a CNCI of 1.11 (Hong Kong), 0.86 (South Korea), and 0.65 (Japan). In Arts, Mainland China only published a small percentage/number of outputs, but its performance on impact is exceptionally well, with a CNCI value of 1.73, which is the highest among all areas in the country.

Overall, East Asian HSS researchers actively engage in international collaborations through coauthorship. During 2000–2023, the percentages of internationally coauthored papers out of all papers are 37.94% (Mainland China), 32.35% (Japan), 40.28% (South Korea), 39.11% (Hong Kong), and 30.7% (Taiwan) (Figure 8). The above proportions are in the middle of the range compared to other global top 20 HSS producers, including 36.79% in Germany, 36.77% in Canada, and 31.87% in the United Kingdom, all of which are significantly higher than that of the United States (19.38%). East Asian HSS scholars have also published a substantial proportion of domestically coauthored articles. The five systems have higher proportions of domestically coauthored papers than other global top 20 HSS producers (with the exception of the United States, having 24.28% domestic collaborations). The figures are 30.94% (Mainland China), 19.83% (Japan), 20.93% (South Korea), 23.82% (Hong Kong), and 28.43% (Taiwan) (Figure 8). As for collaborations by research area, East Asian social sciences researchers have collaborated much more than humanities researchers. This could be because single-authored articles are predominant in the humanities. Moreover, the share of domestic collaborations in East Asian humanities is substantially lower than the share of international collaborations (Figure 8). This shows that East Asian humanities scholars rely more on international collaborations than on domestic collaborations to seek international publication.

Figure 9 shows the trend in the percentage of internationally coauthored and domestically coauthored papers from 2000 to 2023. In Mainland China, the share of international collaborations remained stable at around 40% from 2000–2020, but has been decreasing since 2020, falling to 29.38% in 2023. On the other hand, the proportion of China’s domestically coauthored papers has been climbing, from 18.66% in 2000 to 40.49% in 2023. One possible reason for this is that the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted international collaborations, especially China–US copublications (e.g., Wagner & Cai, 2022). Moreover, the increase of Chinese returnee scholars have made significant contributions to international publications in recent years (e.g., Zhao, Liang, & Li, 2024). Chinese HSS scholars now find it easier to seek collaborations inside the country to publish internationally than before. The result is also consistent with one previous study on China’s SSCI articles from 1979–2018, finding that the proportion of internationally coauthored articles has shown a slight decrease since 2016 (Zhang et al., 2021). The decreasing trend has become more pronounced since 2020, as found in our analysis.

In Hong Kong, the percentages of both international collaborations and domestic collaborations were on an upward trend, with a more pronounced increase in domestic collaborations, from 16.28% in 2000 to 33.18% in 2023. Using English as the working language, Hong Kong has the most internationalized research system in East Asia. Hong Kong HSS scholars can easily find collaborators both internationally and domestically. As for Japan, the proportion of international collaborations has been rising, from 18.28% in 2000 to 42.2% in 2023, while the percentage of domestic collaborations has remained stable at around 20%. Similar to Japan, Taiwan’s HSS scholars tend to collaborate more with international scholars than domestic scholars, with the proportion of international collaborations rising from 24.94% in 2000 to 44.77% in 2023. The proportion of its domestic collaborations exhibited an upward and then downward trend, rising from 18.2% in 2000 to 34.79% in 2011 and then dropping continuously to 23.75% in 2023. This suggests that the increase in international collaborations is an important reason for Taiwan’s growth in the number of international publications over the past two decades. South Korea shows a moderate change in terms of the proportion of collaborations, maintaining a high proportion of internationally coauthored papers (between 35% and 45%) and a relatively low proportion of domestically coauthored papers (between 15% and 25%) (Figure 9).

Regarding the major international collaborators, the five East Asian systems show highly similar patterns (Table 2). Their top 10 international collaborators are mostly located in Asia, Europe, and North America. The United States is the top collaborator of all five systems. Other English-speaking countries (in the sense that English is the main medium for instruction in higher education and research institutions), including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and Singapore, are also major collaborators. Besides, Intra-East Asian collaborations constitute an important force of international collaborations in East Asian HSS research. Being the second largest collaborator with South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as the third largest collaborator with Japan, Mainland China is a central actor in the intra-East Asian connectivity. Japan is the 6th largest collaborator with South Korea, 7th with Taiwan, and 10th with Mainland China. South Korea is the 8th largest collaborator with Hong Kong and Taiwan, and 9th with Japan. Hong Kong is the 4th largest collaborator with Taiwan, 5th with Mainland China, and 7th with South Korea. Taiwan is the 6th largest collaborator with Mainland China and 7th with Hong Kong. Other major collaboration locations include Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and India.

All five East Asian systems have published a high percentage of first-authored and corresponding-authored HSS papers. InCites only provides data on author position starting from 2008. During 2008–2023, 84.92% of the HSS papers published by Mainland China are first-authored papers, and the figure is 82.95% for corresponding-authored output. The ratios are 70.09% and 77.8% for Japan, 71.36% and 80.88% for South Korea, 58.45% and 64.83% for Hong Kong, 73.33% and 84.86% for Taiwan. The proportions are similar to or higher than those of other top 20 producers, such as the United States (73.77% and 86.52%), the United Kingdom (66.18% and 77.79%), Germany (69.83% and 75.76%), and Australia (69.16% and 77.67%).

Figure 10 demonstrates the historical trend in the percentage of first-authored and corresponding-authored output from 2008 to 2023. Mainland China has consistently maintained an upward trend. It has the most significant increase among the five East Asian systems, with first-authored papers increasing from 61.08% (2008) to 91.33% (2023) and the corresponding-authored papers from 68.21% (2008) to 89.21% (2023). Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan also experienced an obvious increase in the proportion of first-authored articles from 2008 to 2016, yet had a downward trend after 2016. Still, these three systems have a high percentage of first-authored papers now, being 75.39%, 74.24%, and 73.49% respectively in 2023. The three systems have published a relatively stable proportion of corresponding-authored articles, with a slight decline in Taiwan. The increase and the high proportion of first-authored and corresponding-authored articles indicates that more and more East Asian HSS scholars possess the capacity to conduct research independently in English and can take a leading role in international collaboration. It is also a result of the research evaluation policies in the region. The East Asian systems in general put more value on first-authored articles (and to a lesser extent corresponding-authored articles) than articles with other author positions in research assessment (Marini & Yang, 2021).

Compared with other East Asian systems, Hong Kong has the lowest percentage of first-authored and corresponding-authored articles, the lowest growth in first-authored articles, and a significant decrease in the proportion of corresponding-authored articles. One explanation is related to the research evaluation system in Hong Kong. Universities in Hong Kong highly emphasize scholars’ international collaboration networks. Apart from first-authored and corresponding-authored articles, scholars are encouraged to publish international collaborative articles (not necessarily as the first or corresponding author) to show their international network and development potential (Sivertsen, 2016).

It is evident from our findings that HSS research in East Asia has developed tremendously in the past 2 decades. Although its achievements are usually overshadowed by the STEM achievements of the region, a deep dive into the bibliometric data shows that the five studied systems (Mainland China, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) are now among the important and leading players in the global HSS research.

Overall, the capacity of East Asian HSS research is reflected in the large volume of research outputs, the good quality of journals where researchers publish their research, the global impact of the outputs in terms of the citations, and the wide global network in research collaboration and East Asian researchers’ leading roles in collaboration. These findings challenge the widely accepted claims that East Asian HSS research lags behind (Altbach, 2013; Chen et al., 2022; Gao & Zheng, 2020) and demonstrate the need to be more cautious about viewing East Asian HSS as the lowland or as endangered species. It is also worth noting that the data analyzed in this study have excluded almost all the outputs written in local languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. In other words, the real capacity and potential of HSS research in East Asia could be greater than this study reveals.

Among the global top 20 HSS research producers, seven systems are outside Australia, Europe, and North America: the five East Asian systems plus Israel and South Africa. This displays how East Asia as a region has become a major contributor to global HSS knowledge. Such a big share of the global outputs has come largely from the rapid development of HSS research in East Asia along with the rather steady development in Europe and North America. The rise of East Asian HSS could also be a part of the global trends of pluralization and multi-polarization identified by previous studies including Aksnes and Sivertsen (2023) and Oldac and Yang (2023). That said, there is still a long way to go before achieving a truly plural and multipolarized global HSS system, even in terms of size. This is because Mainland China is the only East Asian system among the top 10 systems and there exists a significant gap between the volume of the top 10 systems and of the top 10 to 20 systems. The rest of East Asia plus Israel and South Korea all sit between 14th to 19th.

Previous studies have pointed out that international research collaboration is a widely used strategy by Global Southern systems to enhance their research capacity (Kieńć, 2017). This is also the case in East Asia, as shown by the proportion of internationally collaborative research outputs. Regarding roles in collaboration, HSS researchers in the Global South often play secondary roles, including data collection and analysis, rather than leadership roles, including research design and conceptualization (Larivière, Desrochers et al., 2016; Li & Li, 2015). However, in contrast to these observations, this study shows that East Asian HSS researchers are predominantly the first author, and to a lesser extent corresponding author, in international research collaboration. The authorship indicates that they are often in charge of the international collaboration and that they have the capacity to do so. It also reflects the influence of research performance reviews on researchers’ behaviors, as the first and corresponding authorship is much more valued in reviews (Aman & van den Besselaar, 2024; Quan, Chen, & Shu, 2017).

Another influential assumption in the existing literature is that East Asian research outputs are often of lower quality and global impact, although the overall volume of the outputs is now comparable with that of Europe and North America (Cimini, Zaccaria, & Gabrielli, 2016). However, our analysis shows a different picture. In all five of the East Asian systems, more than half of their HSS research outputs are published in good quality (Q1 and Q2) journals. Regarding the impact as measured by citations, the performance of East Asian HSS is consistent with the size of the systems. Within East Asia, Hong Kong and Mainland China perform exceptionally well in both quality and impact. For example, they rank first and third in terms of CNCI globally. Meanwhile, there are certain disciplinary areas in which East Asia is particularly strong, including Economics & Business, Social & Economic Geography, and Media & Communications.

Nonetheless, within East Asian HSS, unbalanced development patterns can also be observed. In part, there exist disciplinary imbalances. East Asia has stronger social sciences than humanities, both quantity- and quality-wise. The social science areas whose research paradigms are closer to those of STEM research tend to be stronger. The weakest social science areas of East Asia include Law and Political Science. This phenomenon could have various causes. The overall emphasis on scientific research rather than humanities research in East Asia may have put the humanities in a more disadvantaged position, leading to a slower development (Marginson, 2022). Meanwhile, compared to social sciences researchers, humanities researchers, especially those in Literature and History, may be more interested in publishing in local languages than in English. Relatedly, the English scholarship genre may pose more challenges to humanities researchers than to social sciences researchers (Li & Yang, 2020). In addition to disciplinary imbalances, there also exist disparities between the five East Asian systems. While Mainland China and Hong Kong are the best performers in most of the HSS areas in terms of quantity, quality, and impact, Japan is much less active in publishing in English, and the quality and impact of its outputs are at the bottom of the global top 20 HSS producers. This could be a result of the different attitudes towards internationalization of research and higher education between these East Asian systems. While Mainland China and Hong Kong governments and institutions have been actively promoting internationalization including English publications in the past decades (Nguyen & Choung, 2020), Japanese institutions and researchers seem to be more conservative in this regard (Rose & McKinley, 2018).

As the first bibliometric analysis into the historical development and current global standings of East Asian HSS, this study has delineated a picture that is in contrast to many taken-for-granted assumptions in the literature about how East Asian HSS lags. Previous studies have mainly used theories of academic dependency and center-periphery structure (e.g., Marginson & Xu, 2023) to analyze the structural disadvantages of East Asian HSS in the global knowledge system, including the dominance of the English language, the high concentration of leading scholars, journals, databases, and publishers in the Anglophone countries, and the dependence on Western ideas, concepts, theories, and methods in research. This study opens up new research possibilities in (re)examining the international visibility of East Asian HSS and investigating how East Asian societies mobilize their agency to develop HSS research in this rapidity against structural disadvantages and epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007; Patelli, Napolitano et al., 2023)?

This study has its limitations. First, the WoS database does not provide the whole picture. Although East Asia actively encourages publishing in WoS, we acknowledge that not all outputs are covered in this database. Future research could investigate other databases, such as Scopus and other publishing media, such as books. Second, it is inadequate to measure the quality and impact of HSS outputs based on citations alone. Has East Asia truly become a global HSS powerhouse in terms of theoretical contributions and key scholars (authors)? Further studies could be done to analyze the geographic distributions of theoretical frameworks and highly cited scholars. Besides, it is also worthwhile asking and looking into the “Why?” and “How?” questions. Why and how East Asian HSS has achieved its current development? How to tackle the existing problems and limitations? What can other HSS systems in the Global South learn from it? In closing, we call for more attention and research into these questions, which will contribute to furthering the pluralization and multipolarization of the global HSS research.

Lili Yang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Project administration, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing. Mengyang Li: Formal analysis, Investigation, Visualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing.

The authors have no competing interests.

This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China in Education under grant number CIA230317 and the Hong Kong Research Grants Committee General Research Fund under grant number 1760772.

The data of this study were retrieved from the InCites platform using the following search query: “Entity Type = (Locations), Publication Date = (2000–2023), Research Area Schema = (OECD), AND Research Area = (5 Social Sciences, 6 Humanities and the Arts)”. Access to these data requires a subscription to the InCites platform, and the data set can be accessed by authorized users through institutional or personal subscriptions.