On the afternoon of June 3, 2020, at the invitation of the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications of Shanghai International Studies University, Wang Ning, the Dean of the School of Humanities and Senior Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gave a wonderful lecture entitled “How can China’s Humanities and Social Sciences Go to the World: Beyond the single mode of SSCI and A&HCI.” Professor Hu Kaibao, Director of the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications of SISU, hosted the lecture. This lecture was the tenth forum of the “Corpus and Interdisciplinary Studies” held by the ICSA.

Professor Wang Ning first talked about the evaluation of the academic competence of humanities and social science scholars. He believes that the evaluation criteria should be diverse, namely a comprehensive investigation from the perspective of participation in international academic conferences and organizations, academic honors, and publication of international academic papers. 

Then, Professor Wang introduced the makeup of SSCI and A&HCI journals, demonstrating ways for Chinese humanities and social science scholars to publish in these journals.

Professor Wang pointed out that it is necessary to organize teams of scholars with exceptional academic achievements and excellent English writing skills to work as groups so as to produce high quality researches and publish in top international journals and with well-known international publishers. At the same time, we need to have a team of translators not only with outstanding foreign language proficiency abut also good understanding of Chinese culture. In addition, we must have a number of good non-profit academic journals and publishers for Chinese humanities and social sciences . Only with this three-pronged approach can voices of Chinese scholars be heard by the international academic community, fully presenting our research in humanities and social sciences to the world. Professor Wang also introduced the preferences of some major international journals in philosophy, language, literature, and cultural studies and strategies of publishing in them, sharing with the audience his years of research on the two major databases and the publication of elite international academic papers.

During the Q&A session, Professor Wang answered questions from the audience about dialogues with international scholars on the topic of COVID-19, the relationship between science, technology and humanities, the representation of literariness in literary translation, and his views on the impact factors of humanities journal of. The lecture provides teachers and students at the lecture a glimpse of ways of academic internalization, and will benefits them in their future academic careers.

Professor Wang Ning:

Wang Ning is the Dean of the School of Humanities of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, senior professor of humanities and social sciences and Chang Jiang scholar professors. He received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Peking University in 1989, and obtained a postdoctoral fund from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and then went to Utrecht University to do research. After returning to China in 1991, he became an associate professor of the English Department of Peking University, and was promoted to professor in 1992. From 1997 to 2000, he served as the director of the Institute of Comparative Literature of Beijing Language and Culture University and the leader and founding mentor of the doctoral program of Comparative Literature and World Literature. In 2000, he received a special allowance from the State Council and was transferred to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of Tsinghua University. Meanwhile, he also served as the founding instructor for the second-level discipline of English language and literature and the first-level discipline of foreign language and literature. He was elected an academician of the Latin American Academy of Sciences in 2010, and was elected “Chang Jiang Scholar” in 2012. In 2013, he was elected a foreign academician of the European Academy of Sciences and thus became the first Chinese (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) humanities and social science scholars to receive this award. In addition, he is the review expert for both the Chinese Literature Group of the National Social Science Foundation and the Literature and Art Group of the Chang Jiang Scholar Award Program of the Ministry of Education. Professor Wang serves as the president of the Chinese Society of Comparative Literature, the vice president of the Chinese and Foreign Literary Theory Society, and the vice president of the Chinese Literary Theory Society. Professor Wang Ning is a prolific scholar, publishing extensively in the fields of modernity theory, postmodernism, globalization and cultural issues, world literature, translation studies, etc. He has published two English monographs, 20 Chinese monographs, more than 450 Chinese papers and more than 130 English papers in more than 30 top international journals or anthologies; more than 100 of his papers are published in SSCI or A&HCI journals. Some of his papers have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Serbian, French, Arabic, etc., and have a wide influence in international humanities and social sciences.