  Purpose: The purpose of this study is to present the landscape of the
cash-per-publication reward policy in China and reveal its trend since the late
1990s.
  Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on the analysis of 168
university documents regarding the cash-per-publication reward policy at 100
Chinese universities.
  Findings: Chinese universities offer cash rewards from 30 to 165,000 USD for
papers published in journals indexed by Web of Science (WoS), and the average
reward amount has been increasing for the past 10 years.
  Originality/value: The cash-per-publication reward policy in China has never
been systematically studied and investigated before except for in some case
studies. This is the first paper that reveals the landscape of the
cash-per-publication reward policy in China.
