Analysis of Discipline Development Discrepancy between the Provincial Cities of China Based on Output of Scientific Papers

Scientific paper is a key factor representing the degree of discipline development in a city or a country. Based on the database of Web of science we comparatively analyzed the outputs of the scientific papers, indexed by science citation index, between 31 provincial cities of China in 10 disciplines of natural science during 2005-2007. The paper quantities for each city as well as the whole country were steadily growing at this stage. The political center Beijing and the economic center Shanghai shared 27.3% and 13.2% of all scientific papers published by these cities, respectively. In contrast, each of the ranked last 13 cities had only a share of lower than 1%. Our data indicated that there were big discrepancies between the provincial cities of China for the development of the disciplines investigated.