Productivity of scientific publications and total citation counts are widely used measures of a nation’s competitiveness in science and technology. According to the latest serial statistical report, China is the world’s second largest country in scientific publications for several years, right after the US, and these publications have the fifth highest citation counts in the world during the period 2003~2013.

Research collaboration is one of the most effective ways for developing countries to increase their research capacity. In particular, the collaboration with developed countries is proved to be a win-win partnership between both sides. Some of the studies have paid great attention to the basic nature of research collaboration, including the motivations, benefits and costs, while others have examined the collaborative patterns and measured the degree (intensity) of collaboration in a quantitative way through analyses of collaborator attributes. However, the individual contribution of collaborators has been largely neglected.

The relationship between authorship position in the bylines and authors’ individual contribution has been proposed and elaborated since the 1980’s. Unfortunately, scholars haven’t come to an agreement on the relationship between every authorship position and its contribution except for the positions of the first and corresponding authors, who are claimed to have principal contribution to the collaborative scientific research. This study aims to assess the strength of China’s publications in the two most distinguishing interdisciplinary journals Nature and Science. By doing so, we propose a developed framework of classifying the publications’ collaborative patterns at the national level based on a combined analysis of co-authorship patterns and authorship positions. The basic rules of classification are presented as follows,

Group A. Articles written by authors all based at Chinese institutions (of cause the first and corresponding authors are both from China);

Group B. Internationally co-authored articles with the first and corresponding authors both based at Chinese institutions;

Group C. Internationally co-authored articles with the corresponding author based at a Chinese institution;

Group D. Internationally co-authored articles with the first author based at a Chinese institution;

Group E. Internationally co-authored articles with neither the first nor the corresponding authors based at Chinese institutions.

Altogether, a total of 925 articles published in Nature and Science are sourced from Web of Science ranging from the year issued the reform and opening up policy (1978) to 2012. Group A, Group B and Group E have the largest three shares of the total, accounting for 14.27%, 19.35% and 62.27% respectively. A further examination of the research impact of articles in each category indicates that Group E articles have received average higher citation counts than Group B articles, and the same with Group B articles compared to Group A articles. In other words, the category where Chinese institutions have least contribution tend to have highest research impact. Great effort should be made by Chinese institutions to strike a balance between the quantity and quality of scientific research in order to join the “world system of science” in a more “decent” way.