BEIJING — China produced a total of 463,800 excellent scientific papers in 2020, up 19.8 percent compared with the volume in 2019, according to a report revealed on Dec 27.

Among them, 216,000 were published in international journals, said the report conducted by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The report defines excellent scientific papers as those published in international and domestic scientific journals with high impact factors and citations.

In terms of disciplines, clinical medicine saw the largest number of excellent scientific papers published in 2020, totaling more than 71,000, followed by chemistry, electronics, communication and automatic control, as well as biology.

Seven universities, including Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Peking University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, top the list in terms of the number of excellent scientific papers published, each with more than 5,000, the report noted.