More than 1.02 million scientific theses have come from Chinese scientific and technical personnel in the past decade, the second-highest number of such theses worldwide, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MST) revealed Friday.

The quality of the theses has also risen, according to statistics from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China under the MST. Theses published from 2002 to 2012 have been cited a total of 6.65 million times, ranking sixth in the world.

China ranked seventh in terms of citations of theses published from 2001 to 2011, according to the statistics released last year.

Theses are cited an average of 6.51 times, with citations of theses on chemistry, material science, engineering technology and mathematics ranking second in the world, respectively.

More than 7,920 scientific theses qualify as "highly-cited theses," or those among the top 1 percent in terms of citations, climbing one place to rank fifth, the institute said.

In 2011, Chinese institutions were published as the first authors of 143,600 scientific papers, marking a year-on-year increase of 10.1 percent.

However, Chinese scientists in 2011 published 141 theses on "Nature," "Science," "Cell" and other world-class magazines and journals, moving down a spot from 2010 to rank tenth.