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Using the InCites tool of Thomson Reuters, this study compares normalized citation impact values calculated for China, Japan, France, Germany, United States, and the UK throughout the time period from 1981 to 2010. InCites offers a unique opportunity to study the normalized citation impacts of countries using (i) a long publication window (1981 to 2010), (ii) a differentiation in (broad or more narrow) subject areas, and (iii) allowing for the use of statistical procedures in order to obtain an insightful investigation of national citation trends across the years. Using four broad categories, our results show significantly increasing trends in citation impact values for France, the UK, and especially Germany across the last thirty years in all areas. The citation impact of papers from China is still at a relatively low level (mostly below the world average), but the country follows an increasing trend line. The USA exhibits a stable pattern of high citation impact values across the years. With small impact differences between the publication years, the US trend is increasing in engineering and technology but decreasing in medical and health sciences as well as in agricultural sciences. Similar to the USA, Japan follows increasing as well as decreasing trends in different subject areas, but the variability across the years is small. In most of the years, papers from Japan perform below or approximately at the world average in each subject area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of globalization has separated the production and consumption of products spatially, and the international trade of products has become a carrier of embodied carbon trade. This paper adopted the perspective of value-added trade to calculate the amount of embodied carbon trade of China from 2006 to 2015 and perform a structural decomposition analysis of the changes in China's embodied carbon trade. This study found that: (1) China's embodied carbon exports are much larger than its embodied carbon imports, and there are differences between countries. China imported the largest amount of embodied carbon from South Korea, and it exported the largest amount of embodied carbon to the United States. (2) The structural decomposition analysis shows that changes in the value-added carbon emission coefficient during the study period would have caused China's embodied carbon trade to decrease, and changes in value-added trade would have caused China's embodied carbon trade to increase. Therefore, countries trading with China need to strengthen their cooperation with China in energy conservation, emission reduction, and product trade. In order to accurately reflect China's embodied carbon trade, it is necessary to calculate embodied carbon trade from the perspective of value-added trade., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Economic cycles may lead to changes in corporate bond credit ratings. This paper utilizes the Markov model to describe transition probability matrixes of economic states for the separation of economic cycles. We develop a new model, which we term the Markov rating shopping dual reputation model, incorporating two reputation effects. This model is well suited to analyze the conditions of the dual rating incentive regulation and the constraint regulation for preventing rating inflation in collusion among credit rating agencies. Then, we apply the Markov regime switching-vector auto-regression (MS-VAR) to estimate the transition probability matrixes of America, England, Japan and China. Based on the numerical analysis and the simulations, the results show that a dual rating regulation can prevent the collusion of inflated ratings, as well as increased rating fees with the separation of economic cycles; additionally, when separating the economic cycles, a constraint regulation is more effective at reducing the risk of rating inflation in collusion and regulatory cost., Competing Interests: PZ is an employee of Purdue Technology Company Ltd of Shenzhen. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. All other authors declare no competing interests exist.

Background: In the past decade, scientific research has developed rapidly in China, but the growth seems to vary widely between different disciplines. In this study, we aimed to compare the quantity and quality of publications in urology and nephrology journals from USA, China and Japan., Methods: Journals listed in the "Urology and Nephrology" category of Science Citation Index Expanded subject categories were included. Scientific papers in these journals written by researchers from USA, Japan and China were retrieved from the "PubMed" and "Web of Knowledge" online databases., Results: The annual number of total scientific articles increased significantly from 2001 to 2010 in China, and has ranked second in the world since 2006. In the field of urology and nephrology, the annual number increased significantly from 2001 to 2010 in USA and China; but not in Japan. The share of articles increased significantly over time in China, decreased significantly in Japan, and remained unchanged in USA. In 2010, USA contributed 32.17% of the total world output in urology and nephrology field and ranked 1(st); Japan contributed 5.19% and ranked 5(th); China contributed 3.83% and ranked 9(th). Publications from USA had the highest accumulated IFs and the highest total citations of articles (USA>Japan>China, p<0.001). No significant difference was found in average IF among the three countries. USA published the most articles in the top 10 urology and nephrology journals (USA(35165)>Japan(6704)>China(2233), p<0.001). Researchers from USA published more clinical trials and randomized controlled trials than Japan and China (USA>Japan>China, p<0.001)., Conclusion: Although China has undergone significant increase in annual number and percentage of scientific publication in urology and nephrology journals in the past decade, it still lags far behind USA and Japan in the field of urology and nephrology in terms of quantity and quality.