Citation of non-English peer review publications – some Chinese examples

English has long been the lingua franca of the scientific world [1]. However, as demonstrated by the various articles in this thematic series of the Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, there are a substantial number of epidemiology and public health journals published in languages other than English today. However, for various reasons, these non-English journals struggle to survive in this competitive world. One possible reason for this is that articles in these journals are hardly cited, perhaps because of their perceived (or real) low quality and/or limited readership, which then contribute to a low impact factor (had they been fortunate enough to be indexed by Thomson Scientific), which then further discourages authors to submit high-quality research articles to these journals.Citations are used in scholarly works to give credit to or acknowledge the influence of previous works, where credit is due. The annual Journal Citation Reports published by Thomson Scientific include a journal impact factor, which is "a ratio between citations and recent citable items published" [2]. It is calculated by dividing the number of cites received in a given year to articles published in the preceding two years by the number of articles published in those two years (citable items). For example, if a journal published 100 citable articles (as defined by Thomson Scientific) in 2006 and 2007, and it was cited 200 times in 2008 for those 100 articles, then the journal receives an impact factor of 2. The journal impact factor was never meant to be the sole basis for 'quality' ranking of journals or research outputs and its merits and weaknesses are open to continual discussion [3,4]. However, it has nevertheless become a significant part of research assessment exercises for universities and research institutions, simply because research outputs for individual researchers and institutions are often measured by the number of articles published in high-quality journals, which are in turn me