We read with great interest your editorial The Impact Factor Game . We noticed that many of the journals indexed by the Science
Citation Index (SCI) pay considerable attention to impact factors and declare their figures on their journals'' Web sites. We believe the game has become a most influential one in todays
scientific evaluation system. For example, some of Chinas universities have adopted it as a core factor in the evaluation of the quality of research articles and recommend that students who are pursuing a doctorate publish at least one so-called SCI-indexed paper.
In total, 6,090 journals are indexed by SCI, most of which are
published in English. However, there are many more scientific journals in the world. Over 6,300 local scientific journals are published here in China, but Chinese journals are rare in the SCI database and most of them have no impact factors.
Some may argue that the SCI database only includes the high-quality journals, but this is not necessarily the case. As a paper published in PLoS Medicine has shown: PubMed-indexed Chinese studies did worse than Chinese studies not indexed in PubMed in defining disease with specific criteria (1720 85 versus 137141 97, respectively; exact p 0.042), and in ascertaining the eligibility of controls (1320 65 versus 129141 92, respectively. The quality of an article is not determined by its language of publication.
Language accounts for much in todays database, especially when we are searching it for evidence. Language bias should not be neglected. A language revolution could contribute to scientific progress.