Chinese Universities Scramble After CAS Journal 'Partition Table' Is Discontinued

Chinese universities are scrambling to adjust after a key research benchmark abruptly disappeared.

On March 27, the Documentation and Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said it would stop updating and publishing its journal “partition table” from 2026 onward. The move immediately created uncertainty for universities and research institutes that have long used the list in hiring, promotion, grant reviews and other assessments.

The disruption matters because the CAS partition table was far more than a library tool. Since its launch in 2004, it had become a de facto ranking system across Chinese academia, sorting journals into tiers that were widely treated as shorthand for research quality. Over time, it became embedded in personnel rules and funding decisions, giving it outsized influence over where researchers aimed to publish and how their work was counted.

CAS materials and product information show the system operated at large scale, with hundreds of subscribing institutions. Reporting has put that reach at about 465 universities and institutes and more than 2 million user visits a year, underscoring how deeply the rankings were woven into daily academic administration.

The timing of the shutdown has added to the confusion. On March 24, a private platform called Xinrui Academic, also known as Xinrui Scholar, released a new journal list called the Xinrui partition. Three days later, CAS announced that its own table would end with the 2025 edition. In the same statement, the academy’s documentation center said journal partition tables published by other institutions had no connection to CAS and said it would pursue legal action if its rights were infringed. The statement made clear that CAS was not endorsing an outside replacement.

That has left universities to improvise. One documented example came from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, which told staff to use the 2025 CAS partition table for 2026 publications and evaluations under a nearest-year rule while the transition is sorted out. Reporting says multiple universities have adopted similar stopgap measures, and some institutions are not treating Xinrui as authoritative until internal decisions are made.

The immediate problem is administrative rather than theoretical. Promotion files still have to be reviewed. Grant applications still need scoring criteria. Hiring committees still need a way to categorize journals when candidates list recent papers. In the absence of a 2026 CAS update, many schools appear to be defaulting to the last available edition while they decide whether to revise their rules or recognize another benchmark.

So far, Xinrui is the most visible attempt to fill the gap. The new list, launched just before the CAS announcement, covers about 22,299 journals and 15 major computer science conference proceedings, according to reporting. Chen Fuyou, the head of Xinrui, said in an interview that the team has five people and that three had long, deep involvement in the original CAS partition work. He also said those team members left the original CAS partition team in 2025 and later joined Xinrui.

Xinrui describes itself as an independent service rather than a continuation of the CAS product. It has said access for ordinary users will remain free and that it plans to make money from institutional services such as application programming interfaces, dataset downloads and analytics. It has also said it is moving toward open citation data instead of relying only on proprietary commercial databases.

Even so, the appearance of a private alternative run in part by former participants in the CAS project does not settle the question of authority. The old table carried weight partly because it came from a prestigious state research institution and had been used for two decades. A new entrant, however technically similar, does not automatically inherit that standing inside university bureaucracies.

The episode lands in the middle of a longstanding debate in China over evaluating papers by the journals they appear in rather than by the substance of the research itself. But for now, the most pressing issue is practical. A powerful quasi-official benchmark is gone, CAS has explicitly distanced itself from outside lists, and universities must decide whether to keep relying on the 2025 table, adopt a private alternative or rewrite their assessment rules altogether.