Evaluating Chinese Legal Scholarship in Journals: Are Journal Rankings and Elite Law Journals Representing the Best Quality?

Abstract

In China law journals are ranked together with journals from the (other) social sciences. As a result the evaluation of journals is based on bibliometric indicators. This has major disadvantages because quantitative indicators, such as citation scores, are merely a proxy for research quality and the citation patterns in law are quite different from other disciplines. Moreover, the current journal rankings do not enhance a fair status competition between law journals because only a very small part of the total amount of Chinese law journals are included in the rankings, while specialized law journals with relatively few readers have to compete with general interest law reviews aiming for a much broader audience. As far as Chinese elite law journals, also apply more qualitative evaluation methods, such as peer review, this does not solve the problem as long as there is no consensus on the criteria that reviewers have to apply and there are no guidelines for the selection of (independent) reviewers. More importantly, there are signs that the peer review process of journals is corrupted by “guanxi” – the informal social relationships that rule the publishing culture in legal academia. This might also explain the high level of in-house publications that can be found in most elite law journals run by staff members from the elite law schools. The paper argues that serious reforms are unavoidable if China wants to be ready for the challenges that globalisation is posing for academic legal publishing.