With the development of biodiversity informatics, more and more data repositories have emerged, providing massive stores of open scientific data. The use of open data is increasingly valuable for scientific research and related decision making but little is known about which topics are addressed, especially in non-English publications. Further, how this data should be cited has been called into question. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is the world’s largest and most widely-used open data access platform on the occurrence of species in nature. Here, we analyze the use of GBIF-mediated data in Chinese language publications. From 623 publications containing the word “GBIF”, we obtained 324 peer-reviewed publications. Among these publications, there were 237 journal papers, 17 doctoral theses, 66 master theses, and 4 conference papers. The publications came from 114 journals and 49 research institutes and universities. We found that the most common topics addressed by these publications were species distribution, climate change, biological invasion and medicinal plants. For data citation, multiple forms coexist. 295 publications (90% of publications) only cited the name of “GBIF” in the main text, without a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Among the 29 publications that cited GBIF in the references, 17 cited the GBIF website, 8 publications listed the URL of a species page in GBIF, and only 4 publications cited a DOI, which is what GBIF recommends. Based on a discussion on the use of GBIF-mediated data and the resulting data citation issues, this study makes three suggestions to improve data citation practice, which are applicable to data citation practice in other non-English publications.