Tracking the development of disciplinary structure in China’s top research universities (1998–2013)

This study focuses on the development of disciplinary structure in China’s top research universities. Using the science structures of Mainland China, the world, and the world’s top 10 universities as three reference standards, we measure the disciplinary structure ‘distance’ between the Chinese ‘985 universities’ and the references, and analyze whether the 985 universities are moving toward or away from the reference groups (RG) in terms of disciplinary structure. The results show that most of the 985 universities’ disciplinary structures are very similar to China’s science structure. The disciplinary structure distances between the 985 universities and both the world reference and the world’s top universities reference have narrowed recently, but the overall degrees of similarity are still low. Another important finding is that the rise of biomedical science has played an important role in the 985 universities’ move from a native ‘sci-engineering focused’ structure to an international ‘bio-science focused’ structure.