The Taiwan Citation Index — Humanities and Social Sciences (TCI-HSS) is a publicly funded citation and literature database, built and operated by Taiwan’s National Central Library (NCL), that indexes journal articles, doctoral dissertations, and books/book chapters in the humanities and social sciences. For a research administrator working with Taiwanese, Hong Kong, or Macao institutions — or evaluating a CV that lists Chinese-language humanities and social-science publications — TCI-HSS is the authoritative source for citation counts and journal standing in a literature that Web of Science and Scopus cover only sparsely.
TCI-HSS sits in the same category of infrastructure as South Korea’s Korea Citation Index (KCI) and Turkey’s TR Dizin: a nationally governed citation database built to give a country’s own-language scholarly output the same kind of standardized, verifiable citation record that international commercial indexes provide for English-language literature.
What TCI-HSS Is and Where It Came From
TCI-HSS was formally launched on 11 September 2013, following collaboration between the National Central Library, the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of Taiwan’s National Science Council (the predecessor body to today’s National Science and Technology Council, NSTC), and the National Applied Research and Technology Policy Research and Information Center. Rather than starting from a blank slate, NCL built TCI-HSS on top of two citation indexes the National Science Council had already been developing since around 2000:
- TSSCI — Taiwan Social Sciences Citation Index: covers education, psychology, law, political science, economics, management, regional studies/geography, and cross-disciplinary social-science fields.
- THCI — Taiwan Humanities Citation Index: covers literature (Chinese, Taiwanese, Hakka, and Indigenous literature), foreign literature, linguistics, history, philosophy and religion, art, and anthropology/ethnic studies.
TCI-HSS incorporates the citation data those two indexes generate and layers on NCL’s own digital-dissertation collection and library catalog holdings, extending coverage to books and doctoral theses that TSSCI and THCI alone did not track. The stated aim is to build a complete citation and bibliographic record of humanities and social-science scholarship from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao going back to 2000.
Governance and Access Model
Unlike Web of Science or Scopus, TCI-HSS is not a commercial subscription product. It is a public-sector initiative, described by NCL itself as designed to serve academic autonomy and the wider academic community and public rather than a profit model — bibliographic search and citation-report functions are openly accessible at tci.ncl.edu.tw without a subscription. Deeper full-text access to individual articles is generally handled separately, through Taiwan’s Airiti Library and other content platforms that license the underlying journal content, but the citation index and journal-evaluation layer itself is a free, government-run resource.
Journal Tiering: Why TSSCI/THCI-Listed Status Matters
For research administrators, the detail that matters most in practice is journal tiering. Since 2016, Taiwan’s national science ministry (the body now known as NSTC) has rated TSSCI and THCI journals into three tiers, with tier-one and tier-two journals classified as core journals. Being listed as a TSSCI or THCI core journal functions in Taiwanese humanities and social-science evaluation roughly the way Scopus or Web of Science indexing functions internationally: it is a recognized quality signal used in faculty promotion and tenure review, doctoral-program journal requirements, and institutional research-output reporting. TCI-HSS’s own Journal Analysis function lets a user look up a specific journal’s citation counts, historical output, and tier status directly.
What TCI-HSS Covers — and What It Doesn’t
- Included: peer-reviewed TSSCI/THCI-listed journal articles; a growing set of academic books and book chapters; doctoral dissertations from NCL’s digital thesis collection, in humanities and social-science fields, principally from Taiwan (with an aim of extending to Hong Kong and Macao publications).
- Not included: STEM and biomedical literature (Taiwan tracks separate discipline-specific evaluation mechanisms for those fields); non-Chinese-language international humanities/social-science journals, which fall under Web of Science and Scopus coverage instead; and — like any national citation index — anything published before roughly 2000, since that is the index’s stated coverage start point.
Because TCI-HSS is scoped to humanities and social sciences specifically, it should not be confused with a general-purpose Taiwanese research database; there is no equivalent single national STEM citation index run the same way. Research administrators assembling a full publication record for a Taiwanese scholar working across disciplines will typically need to combine TCI-HSS with Web of Science, Scopus, or a discipline-specific index for any non-HSS output.
Why This Matters for Research Administrators
TCI-HSS comes up in a few recurring administrative contexts:
- Tenure and promotion dossiers. A candidate’s Chinese-language TSSCI/THCI-listed publications typically will not appear, or will appear with unreliable citation counts, in Web of Science or Scopus. TCI-HSS is the correct source to verify those citation figures and confirm a journal’s core-tier status.
- Grant and institutional reporting. Taiwanese universities and funders that require citation-index verification for humanities/social-science output generally expect TSSCI/THCI/TCI-HSS records, not an international index, for that portion of a researcher’s output.
- Cross-border collaboration assessment. Administrators at institutions partnering with Taiwanese, Hong Kong, or Macao humanities and social-science departments benefit from knowing this infrastructure exists and how it differs from the commercial CRIS and citation-index landscape they may already be familiar with.
How TCI-HSS Compares to Other National Citation Indexes
TCI-HSS is one of several national or regional citation databases built specifically because commercial indexes underrepresent locally published, non-English-language scholarship. It follows a broadly similar logic to South Korea’s KCI/KRI and Turkey’s TR Dizin — government-run, openly accessible, and tied directly into national faculty-evaluation and tiering systems — though TCI-HSS is scoped narrowly to humanities and social sciences rather than covering all disciplines the way KCI does. All three exist for the same underlying reason: citation-based evaluation only works fairly if the index used actually captures where a country’s scholars are publishing, and for humanities and social-science work published in Chinese, Korean, or Turkish, that is rarely Web of Science or Scopus.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is TCI-HSS the same thing as TSSCI or THCI?
No. TSSCI and THCI are the two underlying discipline-specific citation indexes (social sciences and humanities, respectively) that Taiwan’s science ministry has developed and tiered since around 2000/2016. TCI-HSS is the unified database platform, built and operated by the National Central Library, that presents TSSCI and THCI citation data alongside dissertations and books in one searchable interface.
Who governs TCI-HSS?
The National Central Library operates the platform, in collaboration with the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (formerly the National Science Council) and the National Applied Research and Technology Policy Research and Information Center, which were involved in its establishment.
Is TCI-HSS free to use?
Yes. Bibliographic search and citation-report functions are openly accessible without a subscription, consistent with its public-sector, non-commercial governance model — unlike Web of Science or Scopus.
Does TCI-HSS cover STEM fields?
No. TCI-HSS is scoped specifically to humanities and social sciences. STEM and biomedical output is not part of its coverage.
How far back does TCI-HSS coverage go?
The database’s stated coverage aim is Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao humanities and social-science publications from 2000 onward, though depth varies by journal and document type.
Related CASRAI Resources
For the broader research-information infrastructure this database sits within, see the Persistent Identifiers & Research Information Systems hub, and for Taiwan’s national science governance more broadly, see NSTC (Taiwan): National Science and Technology Council Explained and Taiwan NSTC’s Guidelines for Handling and Investigating Research Misconduct.
