Chinese academics have slammed Thomson Reuters' sale of its Science Citation Index (SCI) to two investment companies, saying the move may commercialize scientific research.

Data and information services provider Thomson Reuters said in an announcement on July 11 that the company has sold SCI to two investment companies, Toronto's Onex Corp and Hong Kong's Baring Private Equity Asia.

SCI is a citation index of more than 6,500 notable journals across 150 disciplines from 1900 to the present. These are alternately described as the world's leading journals of science and technology. 

"SCI is an important factor in the careers of Chinese researchers as a crucial standard for their promotion is how many of their academic papers have been published in SCI-listed journals," Wang Gengchen, a research fellow with the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), told the Global Times Tuesday.

According to Wang, the sale was purely driven by profit. "Selling SCI to investment companies instead of academic organizations may commercialize the indexes and tamper with academic research.

"Driven by commercial profits, the indexes' new owners may favor papers on one specific field, leading researchers to focus on that field while neglecting other fields that society really needs," Wang argued.

However, other academics believe the sale will not have an impact on them. 

"It's just the sale of SCI from one commercial company to another, which won't change the fact that it is a profit-making tool. So it won't have significant impact on academics," Yan Jianbing, a professor at Huazhong Agricultural University, told the Global Times.

"SCI positively impacted Chinese academics by promoting academic exchanges and giving us a quantitative tool to evaluate researchers' achievements, but holding SCI up as the only standard for evaluation is one-sided," Wang Zifa, a research fellow with CAS' Institute of Atmospheric Physics, told the Global Times.

The American Society for Microbiology published a statement on July 11 saying that scientists' obsession with journal ratings is a "tragedy of the commons" that damages the academic community interests.