China published 78,200 Ei-indexed theses in 2007, overtaking the United States for the first time to be the world's number one, the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC) said Tuesday.

The Ei theses are scientific and technical ones indexed by the US based Engineering Index.

ISTIC statistics also showed, the number of Chinese theses indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI) topped 94,800 in 2007, 7.5 percent of the world's total, ranking third after the United States and Britain.

China's theses indexed by the Index to Scientific and Technical Proceedings (ISTP) were 45,300, 10,1 percent of the world's total and the second among all countries.

Most of the theses were on disciplines such as chemistry, computer science, physics, materials science, telecommunication, automatic control, biology, dynamics and electronics, mathematics, architecture and geography.

(Xinhua News Agency December 9, 2008)