A June 2026 Nature news feature, “What’s behind China’s historically high counts of corresponding authors?,” reports that papers with authors based in China have run persistently, unusually high in one specific metric: the number of corresponding authors listed per paper, not where a single corresponding author sits in the byline. That is a different phenomenon from the byline-position conventions CASRAI has already documented for the region, and it has a distinct, policy-driven explanation.
What the Nature feature reports
According to the feature, the share of China-authored papers naming more than one corresponding author rose from about 21.6% in 2016 to nearly 30% by 2020 — roughly triple the global average for the same period, and Nature reports researchers in China were up to nine times more likely than researchers elsewhere to list multiple corresponding authors on a single paper across that window. The underlying bibliometric pattern is documented in the peer-reviewed literature as well: a Scientometrics study, “The emerging phenomenon of multiple corresponding authorship in China,” frames the practice as a strategic adaptation to China’s incentive-driven research evaluation system rather than a stable disciplinary or cultural convention.
Count vs. position: two different East Asian authorship stories
CASRAI’s existing guide, Author Order in China, Japan, and Korea: How It Differs from the West, documents a well-established bibliometric clustering pattern: in China, South Korea, and Taiwan, the single corresponding author is conventionally the last-listed name (the senior PI), reflecting a Confucian-influenced convention around hierarchy and responsibility, distinct again from Japan’s second-author pattern and the US/UK/Germany first-author pattern.
That guide is about where one corresponding author sits. What the Nature feature describes is a different, more recent trend: how many people are designated corresponding author on the same paper. Multiple co-corresponding authorship is its own convention, already covered generally in CASRAI’s Co-Corresponding Authors: How Journals Handle a Shared Corresponding-Author Role guide. What is specific to the China pattern Nature reports on is not the existence of co-corresponding authorship as a mechanism — many countries use it legitimately for genuinely co-led, multi-site work — but the scale at which it has been used, and the institutional incentives that reporting says drove that scale.
The incentive structure behind the count
The driver Nature and the Scientometrics analysis both point to is not a citation or contribution norm but an evaluation and funding mechanic. In much of China’s university and grant-review system, corresponding-author status — not first-author status — has historically been the byline slot most heavily weighted in hiring, promotion, and grant-eligibility review, on the reasoning that it marks the researcher who directed and takes ultimate responsibility for the work. When a paper legitimately has more than one senior co-lead (common in large, multi-lab, or multi-institution collaborations), naming all of them as co-corresponding authors lets each claim that evaluation-relevant credit for the same output. Reporting on the trend also ties it to now-discontinued cash-for-publication schemes: the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) previously paid researchers cash rewards tied to publication, a policy that has since ended, alongside broader scrutiny of gift authorship — adding contributors to a byline without a commensurate contribution.
NSFC’s policy response
Per the reporting, NSFC has moved toward requiring researchers to explicitly disclose individual contributions on submitted work and has adopted stricter prohibitions on misrepresenting or exaggerating a listed contributor’s role. The intent, as reported, is to pull authorship designation — including who is named corresponding author — back toward reflecting actual responsibility for the work rather than functioning as a proxy metric optimized for institutional evaluation. Nature’s feature notes these reforms are expected to have already dampened the multiple-corresponding-author trend, though the bibliometric data cited predates their full rollout, so the size of that effect is not yet independently confirmed in published bibliometric data at the time of writing.
Why this matters beyond China
The pattern is a useful case study for anyone designing authorship-evaluation policy, not just China-focused. It illustrates a general risk that CASRAI’s CRediT taxonomy guidance and contributor-role standards more broadly exist to address: any authorship signal that gets used as a proxy metric in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions creates pressure to optimize the signal itself rather than the underlying contribution it was meant to represent. Research offices, promotion committees, and international collaborators evaluating a CV or paper trail that includes China-based co-authors should treat a multiple-corresponding-author byline as a prompt to check the paper’s own contribution statement (where CRediT roles are declared) rather than infer seniority or leadership from the corresponding-author designation alone — the same caution CASRAI recommends when reading corresponding-author position across the China/Japan/Korea/US conventions generally.
Related CASRAI resources
- Author Order in China, Japan, and Korea: How It Differs from the West
- Co-Corresponding Authors: How Journals Handle a Shared Corresponding-Author Role
- Equal-Contribution Authorship Is Rising Sharply, a 480,000-Paper Bibliometric Analysis Finds
- NSFC (National Natural Science Foundation of China): A Funding Overview for International Researchers
- CAST (China Association for Science and Technology): Its Role in Research Integrity
