With science and technology profoundly reshaping society, Science, Technology and Society Studies (STS) has become an increasingly important research field and is undergoing progressive institutionalisation worldwide. To assess the overall and disciplinary-specific internationalisation progress of Chinese STS research, this study proposes a catalogue of high-quality international STS journals and systematically examines publications by Chinese scholars in representative journals from 2001 to 2025. The analysis focuses on publication trends, collaboration networks, funding support, and research themes. Results show that Chinese scholars’ output follows a clearly fluctuating upward trend, with growth rates reaching periodic peaks every few years, while a stable phase of rapid expansion has yet to emerge. Across sub-disciplines, scientometrics and comprehensive studies exhibit faster internationalisation than philosophy of science, history of science, and sociology of science, within which the global share remains relatively limited. While the overall proportion of internationally collaborative papers is relatively low, China-led collaborations are on the rise, and the range of partner countries and regions is expanding. The proportion of articles acknowledging funding has risen markedly since 2012, most of which are non-international collaborative, whereas such acknowledgements remain comparatively low in the history of science journals. Research on Chinese stories (China-themed issues) has gradually increased, reflecting responses to national science and technology challenges as well as the global dissemination of Chinese thought, yet such research is still less frequent than studies addressing global issues across subfields, including philosophy of science, history of science, and scientometrics. Overall, the findings provide an evidence-based assessment of the internationalisation of Chinese STS research and indicate substantial room for further progress.
Zhang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.