Impacts of government website information on social sciences and humanities in China: A citation analysis

• Government website information citation shows a steady increase.
• The influence of government website information is higher on Chinese social science but lower on humanities.
• Chinese scholars tend to cite authoritative and highly visible government-owned media information as supporting evidence.
• Chinese scholars prefer to cite current social topics with processed data.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the current state and trend of government website information cited by social science and humanities (SS&H) journal articles in China. The Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI) was used as the benchmark and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals as the reference samples. It analyzed 204,019 web citations (N = 5,063,237) found in 925,506 articles that were published in CSSCI journals during the 1998–2009 period. The findings unveil that web citations accounted for only 4.03% of the total number of citations (N = 5,063,237), and that citations of Chinese government websites constituted 6.6% of the total number of web citations (N = 204,019). The study disclosed detailed information regarding citations derived from ministries and commissions directly under the State Council websites (N = 69), government online media (N = 7), government website citation subjects (N = 21), and various types of government website information (N = 5). Although government website information has limited influence on SS&H, their impact is currently growing rapidly. In comparison with international research community, influence of government web information on Chinese social science is higher, while its influence on humanities is lower. Essentially, Chinese scholars put emphasis on citing information from authoritative central government websites or highly visible state-owned media information as supporting evidences in their articles. In general, the citation of information from Chinese government website tends to hot social issues of society. Finally, it is necessary to promote the visibility of local government websites, to develop policies and guidelines to encourage the disclosure and the diversity of data, so that there will be more citation balances between social and technological topics.