Linguistic journals in China: History and current state

This paper aims to track back the evolution of Chinese linguistic journals since the appearance of the first journal to nowadays in order to analyze the structure and content of a Chinese linguistic article paying special attention to the abstract as a coherent scientific minitext. The material for the study was comprised by 100 Chinese linguistic papers published in 1959–2024 in the leading Chinese journals included in Beijing and Nanjing Catalogs. The articles were selected by continuous sampling, then they were classified and processed using descriptive statistical instruments (averages and quartiles). The results show that the linguistic subgenre of the Chinese scientific discourse is undergoing the formation stage moving towards the international standards. First, it was found that before 2000, linguistic papers were characterized by relatively small size, the lack of unified format, article information and necessary structural elements. Contemporary articles are closer to the international standards both in the presence of obligatory structural elements and their language markers. Second, these papers display a tendency of intensive use of the innovative results described in leading international journals published in English. Finally, it was also found that the challenges to promote Chinese journals on the internal arena include the language itself, the editing system and the differences in academic standards.