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Objectives To analyse the contributions of authors from three major regions of China - the Mainland ( ML), Hong Kong ( HK) and Taiwan ( TW) - in the field of health care sciences and services. Methods Articles published by Chinese authors between 1998 and 2012 in the category of health care sciences and services were retrieved from the Science Citation Index Expanded ( scie) database. The numbers of total articles, impact factors, citations, articles included in the top 10 highest impact journals and the 10 journals that published the most papers were recorded. Results ML, HK and TW published 615, 415 and 1162, respectively, with accumulated impact factors of 1281.65, 904.29 and 2361.44; average impact factor of 2.08, 2.18 and 2.03; and total citation times of 2313, 2652, and 4818. Regarding the top 10 high-impact journals, ML, HK and TW accounted for 28.25%, 27.68% and 44.07%, respectively. Total impact factors of the most popular 10 journals for ML, HK and TW were 20.86, 22.08 and 18.92, respectively. Discussion and Conclusions Both the quality and quantity of papers published in health care sciences and services journals from ML, HK and TW have greatly improved. ML and HK have different strong points, while the gap with TW diminished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]