///What is SCI? ///
SCI, the abbreviation of American Science Citation Index, is a periodical literature retrieval tool founded by institute for scientific information (ISI), originally belonging to Thomson Reuters Company [1]. Academic journals included in SCI are called SCI journals, and scientific papers included in SCI journals are called SCI papers.
SCI currently contains abstracts and citations of 8853 academic journals around the world [2]. Its periodical contents mainly involve mathematics, science, culture, agriculture, forestry, medicine, biology, etc. 150 basic scientific research fields, which are mainly suitable for evaluating the achievements of basic research [3]. According to the Basic Scientific Indicators Database (ESI) published by institute for scientific information, there are ***22 main disciplines.
///Why was SCI consecrated as an altar? ///
In the late 1980s, Nanjing University took the lead in introducing SCI. Professor Dong Jian, former vice-president of Nanjing University, suggested that SCI should be an important index of scientific evaluation, and this evaluation system has become a relatively objective scientific evaluation standard in China's scientific and technological circles for a period of time.
Subsequently, more and more colleges and universities followed suit, but the SCI paper evaluation system quickly spread to national scientific and educational institutions, causing a series of adverse consequences. Professor Sun Yat-sen University compares it to "the academic cancer of China" [5], and some scholars think that SCI is more harmful than "opium".
For university teachers, the number of SCI papers is an important index to evaluate professional titles. According to the general requirements of 2 1 1 university, as long as three or six SCI articles can be published in journals above the second district (please refer to the periodical division table of Chinese Academy of Sciences), all of them can be promoted to associate professors without exception, and five or eight articles can be directly applied for professor selection. In addition, high economic returns are also essential.
For doctoral students, if they want to graduate, they should not only meet the prescribed study time, but also publish enough papers with sufficient quantity and quality. For example, if a doctoral student of Beihang University wants to graduate, he must publish more than three SCI papers with a total impact factor of 3.0, and at least one paper is published in a foreign journal with an impact factor of 1.0, which means that the influence of the journal needs to reach a certain level.