Topical and Geographical Focus of Chinese Oceanographic Research - A Study of Trends in Publication

Since the economic boom started in the early 1990s, China has expanded its educational and scientific programs. Funds increase rapidly for education and scientific research. From 1993 to 2006, enrollment of full time students in universities and colleges grew from 924,000 to 5,400,000, total number of students including part-time increased from 5,000,000 to 25,000,000, and the percentage of the enrolled full time students in the age 18-22 group jumped from 5 to 22 Table 1, and research funds for ocean sciences from the National Natural Science Foundation of China NSFC increased from 12.33 million CNY supporting 58 projects to 40.05 million supporting 141 projects. Similarly, NSFC funds for the geosciences increased from 105.31 to 351.38 CNY and the number of projects more than doubled. Universities, research institutes, and laboratories have been expanded or re-organized. Small colleges have been combined and upgraded into big universities. Along with these changes, the oceanographic community has been growing rapidly and new Chinese language journals have been created. To inform foreign ocean scientists about the Chinese oceanographic community and its priorities for future collaboration, we will introduce the research institutes and universities where oceanography is studied and study trends in 38 Chinese language oceanography journals.