The 2018 Report on Chinese Mainland Universities Overseas Network Communication Power was released to the public recently. East China Normal University ranked No. 13 among all the universities in the Chinese Mainland, in which ECNU’s rankings in Twitter (No. 5 in Chinese Mainland and No. 1 in Shanghai) and Facebook (No. 7 in Chinese Mainland and No. 2 in Shanghai) were most impressive. ECNU ranked at 25 in Google, 26 in Wikipedia and 25 in Instagram respectively.
Statistical method of 2018 overseas network communication power of Chinese universities
The report was jointly released by the New Media Communication Research Center of Beijing Normal University, the Education News and Media Research Center of Beijing Normal University, the Research and Publication Center of Guangming Daily Think Tank and China Daily Network.
For the analytical study, the research team selected 184 universities in China, including 141 Chinese mainland universities (covering all of the “double first-class” and the former “211”s) and 43 universities in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. Four universities in Japan and South Korea and four in the U.S. were also selected for references.
By collecting data from 6 platforms (Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube), researchers adopted panoramic analysis to study Chinese universities’ overseas network communication power. Each category with its proportional amount is demonstrated as below:
ECNU’s scores on each indicator in 2018
Blue bar: ECNU’s ranking on each indicator among universities in Chinese mainland
Red bar: ECNU’S ranking on each indicator among universities in Shanghai
According to the report, the top ten universities of Overseas Network Communication Power in Chinese Mainland are: Peking University, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing University, Zhejiang University, Fudan University, Tianjin University, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Sichuan University.
While traditional comprehensive universities have showed their superior strengths in overseas network communication, many newer universities with characteristic disciplines are emerging onto the popular academic scene, and have formed their own advantages in overseas network communication.
The study points out that the overseas network communication power of Chinese mainland universities has the following characteristics: first, the overseas network communication power of the mainland's top universities has surpassed that of Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and the gap between the reference universities and American universities is narrowing. Second, universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Nanjing have outstanding overseas network communication power. Third, the overseas social networking platform construction of Chinese mainland universities is relatively weak, and there is a big gap with universities in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea on the whole. Fourth, the higher the academic communication power, the higher the overseas network communication power.
It is worth mentioning that the correlation analysis of academic communication power ranking and overseas communication power ranking is a new content of the 2018 report. After analyzing the data of 141 mainland universities, it is found that there is a significant correlation between them. The data of academic communication power of universities are obtained from ESI database, which integrates and calculates the number of papers published, the number of citations, the number of citations per paper and the number of papers in the TOP area from 2008 to 2018. Among the top 10 universities in mainland China in terms of academic communication ability, 4 universities in mainland China ranked in the top 10 in terms of overseas network communication ability, and our university ranked 36th in terms of academic communication ability.
As China steps closer to the center of the world stage, China and the world are deeply integrated and interact with each other. The report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) pointed out that it is necessary to promote the building of international communication capacity, tell a good Chinese story, present a true, three-dimensional and comprehensive China, and enhance the country's cultural soft power. Chinese universities are an important carrier of international communication and also an important force to enhance the country's cultural soft power. ECNU has entered the ranks of national double first-class universities, and its international reputation construction and overseas communication work have also been promoted to the core strategic level. The overseas publicity work of the university, which is under the charge of the publicity department of the party committee, started in 2012, focusing on online publicity. The work involves the operation and maintenance of official websites in English, French and overseas social media. In the future, the overseas publicity work will focus on the goal of realizing multilingual communication proposed in the school influence enhancement project, and make every effort to build a multilingual publicity platform for global media.
Proofread by Joshua Mayfield Reviewed by Wenjun Guo
