An annual report has revealed that papers on science and technology written by Chinese scientists were cited over 5 million times over the past 10 years, making China the seventh-largest source of such citations.

The report was published on ScienceWatch.com with the support of Thomson Reuters, with 20 countries' citations recorded in overlapping five-year increments starting from 2001.

Of the top 20 countries, the United States remained the first with 48,862,100 total citations, followed by Germany, England, Japan, France and Canada.

According to the report, the number of citations from Chinese scientists' papers between 2007 and 2011 nearly quadrupled compared with that during the 2001-2005 interval, with chemistry, material science, engineering and mathematics being the most-cited fields.

However, a separate report released in December by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) noted that the number of average citations for each Chinese scientific paper, a benchmark for the quality of research papers, remains at a lower level.

In 2011, the average number of citations per paper was 6.21, up by 5.8 percent year-on-year, but still far below the global average of 10.71 citations, according to the report.