China produced a total of 480,500 scientific papers classified as "excellent" in 2021, an increase of about 17,000 over the previous year, an official report showed Thursday.

Among the papers, some 211,300 were published in international journals, according to the report released by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The report defines excellent scientific papers as those published in international and domestic scientific journals with high-impact factors and citations.

The number of excellent scientific papers in eight fields, including clinical medicine, chemistry, environmental science, electronics and biology, exceeded 20,000 in 2021, the report showed.

China has witnessed a steadily increasing number of excellent scientific papers, and is publishing a growing number of papers in leading domestic scientific journals, said Zhao Zhiyun, head of the institute.