2026 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 101-114
The academic world is based on good faith, even in its peer review system, and therefore assumes unconscious agreement among the parties involved, rendering it vulnerable to potential threats. This study aims to examine the uncritical acceptance of internationally unrecognized and demarcated borderlines in academia. For this purpose, it extracts 242 maps of China and the South China Sea area from 25,144 articles published in five representative international journals on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect. The presence or absence of the Nine-dash line in these maps is binarized, and the extent to which the depiction could be explained by their authors’ attributes is examined. The adjusted odds ratio and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using a logistic regression model with the presence or absence of lines as the objective variables. The adjusted odds ratio for Chinese and foreign researchers was 2.44(95% CI: 1.77–3.38, p<.01) and 0.08(95% CI: 0.01–0.65, p<.05), respectively, indicating a positive relationship for the former and a negative relationship for the latter. The present analyses reveal that current academic journal submission guidelines, which entrust authors with discretion over map representations and refrain from scrutinizing content, carry the potential risk of tacitly condoning “unilateral attempt[s] to change the status quo by force” by specific countries or regions.
