Researchers based in China or having a Chinese surname were far less likely than their US and Canadian counterparts to have papers published in the world’s most prestigious journals, according to a new study.

Just 2.5 per cent of submissions from China-based researchers were accepted, compared with 8.3 per cent overall for those from North America, a team found after analysing a rare dataset of more than 110,000 manuscripts submitted to Science and Science Advances between 2015 and 2020.

Even among US-based scientists, those with Chinese surnames had lower publication rates than those without Chinese surnames, they reported in Science Advances on July 15.

Sam Zhang, the study’s lead author and a computational social scientist at the University of Vermont, said one reason might be that China’s research system offered career and financial incentives for scientists to submit to elite journals such as Science.

That could encourage submissions even when some studies were not the best fit for the journals’ broad scientific scope.