Resources for STEM Scholars

China Research Gateway (CRG) represents a transformative level of access to STEM research materials. Historically, North American libraries have acquired less STEM content from China than they have social science and humanities content. CRG represents an opportunity to close that gap, allowing North American researchers to make full use of China’s rapid STEM research development. Without access to China’s voluminous STEM publications, North American researchers are at an information disadvantage. While North American STEM researchers generally lack access to any Chinese research, Chinese researchers make use of the full breadth of North American research.

Strengths in CRG

Particular highlights in the CRG package include the STEM series of China Academic Journals, China Conference Proceedings, and China Patents. While China Academic Journals contains comprehensive journal publications, both China Conference Proceedings and China Patents allow STEM researchers to track the most recent developments in their fields, including those developments that have not made it to publication.

Transformative Support for STEM Researchers

One reason for the delayed uptake of Chinese STEM content in the North American market is language accessibility. Until now, researchers who cannot read Chinese could not make full use of Chinese research. CRG has fundamentally changed the user experience of accessing Chinese research.

Users access a single URL to the CRG portal. The portal contains links to CRG’s constituent databases, English information on each database, including English-language user guides, fact sheets, and title lists. Through the portal, researchers can easily contact East View for support or make use of video tutorials. In the CRG portal, the database pages clearly note what user interface languages are available. The majority of the databases in CRG have English user interfaces. In addition to Academic Reference, which is entirely in English, including full text, there are numerous databases that have English abstract and indexing information. Nothing in these databases prevents researchers from copy and pasting full text articles into a machine translation software.