BEIJING - Theses authored by Chinese science and technology researchers published in international publications were cited 19.35 million times in the past 10 years, according to the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China.

The figure was 29.9 percent higher than in the 2016 report, ranking China the second in the world in terms of citations.

In the past decade, the average number of citations for each thesis of the kind was 9.4 times, 9.9 percent higher than last year's.

Among all such theses publicized in 2016, 25.8 percent were co-authored by Chinese and foreign researchers and 71.6 percent of the co-authored works had Chinese researchers as their first authors, the report said.

China has ranked second in the world for eight years in terms of the number of science and technology theses published in international publications.

In 2016, the Science Citation Index database included 324,200 science and technology theses by Chinese authors, 17.1 percent of the world total.