China continued to rank fifth in terms of the number of theses published in the most influential scientific journals in 2014, a government think tank revealed on Wednesday.

A total of 2,126 theses were carried by the three leading scientific publications Science, Nature and Cell last year, among which 177 were from Chinese scientists, according to the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The rank is the same with that of 2013, moving up four spots from the ninth in 2012, the institute said.

Chinese theses' overall quality has risen, according to the institute.In the past decade, more than 1.58 million scientific theses published on international publications have come from Chinese scientific and technical personnel, and these works have been cited 12.87 million times, the fourth-highest number worldwide.

The citation number is close to the second and third ranking nations Germany and Britain, but is still far behind the United States, which ranked first with more than 60 million.

Citations of Chinese theses ranked second worldwide in seven fields including mathematics, medicine and agricultural sciences, according to the institute.