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China Will Lead World Scientific Research By 2020
Hugh Pickens writes "An analysis of papers published in 10,500 academic journals across the world shows that, in terms of academic papers published, China is now second only to the US, and will take first place by 2020. Chinese scientists are increasing their output at a far faster rate than counterparts in rival 'emerging' nations such as India, Russia, and Brazil. The number of peer-reviewed papers published by Chinese researchers rose 64-fold over the past 30 years. 'China is out on its own, far ahead of the pack,' says James Wilsdon, of the Royal Society in London. 'If anything, China's recent research performance has exceeded even the high expectations of four or five years ago.' According to Wilsdon, three main factors are driving Chinese research. First is the government's enormous investment, with funding increases far above the rate of inflation, at all levels of the system from schools to postgraduate research. Second is the organized flow of knowledge from basic science to commercial applications. And third is the efficient and flexible way in which China is tapping the expertise of its extensive scientific diaspora in North America and Europe, tempting back mid-career scientists with deals that allow them to spend part of the year working in the West and part in China." Here's the Financial Times's original article.
An astonishing fraction of research "results" from China are just plain made up. No wonder they're so prolific! I don't doubt that they will eventually make significant scientific contributions as a nation -- they're 20% of the world's population, after all -- but they're going to have to clean up their act before the global scientific community starts to take them seriously.
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
It's the same in chemistry. What gets published in Chinese journals would get flat-out rejected from a US peer-reviewed journal. And the data is about as trustworthy as an old (1970's-ish) Russian journal, where often they just group a whole bunch of variations on a compound together and say they all react with the same mechanism, even when they shouldn't. That makes me have to disprove them, which eats up a lot of my own time. I've had to do it with both Chinese and Russian data in the fuel-cell polymer field.
I am become
I think you forgot that China is 10 Japans
:P
No I didn't, Japan didn't stop growing because it ran out of people(though that certainly is a risk in the future), it stopped growing because it's economic model, the EXACT same model China is using, works really well you are playing catch-up, but tends to fall apart really quickly once you are about equal with your competitors. China is heading for a crash much like Japan in the near future. Also, although China's population is 10x that of Japan, they are actually facing a very similar demographic challenge, the average age of the Chinese is increasing and the one-child per family policy is going to come back to bite them in the ass eventually when there are more retirees than there are workers.
In addition, China is facing a demographic challenge that the Japanese are not facing, namely a shortage of women. By 2020 there will be massive social unrest in China as thousands of men who cannot find brides start becoming really aggressive. What I find hilarious about the situation is the fact that China actively discourages homosexuality. Hell, if I were running a country where there were on average 120 males to every 100 females, I would be out there promoting homosexuality like crazy, if more men were gay then they wouldn't riot about not being able to find a woman
Monstar L
Let me bust some myths here...
1. By publication numbers, YES! China or even any Asian institution can easily knock down a Western institution. But once you bring in "Impact Factor", Asian institutions sink in to the bottom of the pacific!!
Maybe Westerners don't know much about what I'm about to tell. In general, researchers in Asia (especially of Chinese descent) loves to publish barrage of papers every year. Most institutions in this part of the world gives you incentives/bonuses based on the "number" of publications.
How do I know this? Because I'm a PhD student in an university in south-east Asia. When I entered this department, head of research was a mainland Chinese. His first rule was "publish at least 1 journal + 1 conference paper every year. Without 2 journal papers, I won't even read your thesis".
As a consequence of this rat-race, people here are just publishing every crap they can and they don't respect the quality or adherence to ethics of sciences. Even one time, a chinese-descent researcher asked me to fake/make-up data and publish (in fact, that's how she get really amazing data for publications). Here people may call it "scientific discovery", but for a proper trained eyes (like myself), its nothing but "scientific fraud".
Personally, I'm very disappointed with how research departments operate here. Hence I applied to US grad schools last month.
2. Can China improve ? I'm not sure. But certainly I have met several extremely talented mainland Chinese researchers, but all of them reside in some other country (e.g. Australia, Singapore).
Then again, I was asked to review a conference paper, written by *post-doc* students from a non-popular rural university in China. Literally, it was unreadable. It seems they have heavily used the thesaurus or used a translator altogether. Lets forget about the language (even I am happy to help them re-write the paper). That particular paper I read, it didn't prove anything significant nor important, knowledge contribution wise.. NULL. Undergrads in my university report much better research outcomes.
So it is hard to predict... but surely, western institutions still have the mojo.
3. Despite what we see and read, I strongly believe they (Chinese) have a proper R&D knowledge sphere hidden out somewhere. Otherwise, they won't be able to progress in nuclear, military and other technology fronts. Also not to forget, they have journals and other publications in *chinese*.... which I believe are out of reach to us, as we can't read Chinese and those material hardly get translated to English and reach to science databases in west.
As of 2010, it is safe to say... US/UK/EU institutions have the monopoly in Research.. and Asia is nothing but spammers to periodicals. Just my $0.02...
When I was still in grad school, it was also the same in certain web technology research areas. I've read a bunch of conference submission papers from Chinese students and nearly all of it was non-original, improperly cited, and poorly researched. The problem they are having is that it takes time to boot strap a research program. You need to build a research culture, nurture experts in the sciences and have the free flow of ideas going. The last one is going to be a challenge for China and I sometimes wonder if they will be able to make it over that hump given their extreme censorship policies.
As an aside, I find it interesting how culture effects research. When I was going to conferences US and even researchers from the EU would often present ideas that achieved a goal around a free market mechanism. Chinese researchers nearly always spoke of centralized control, even when the scale of the idea was really too big to make it work.
Second, nobody expects China's population to outproduce Americans on a per-capita basis anytime soon. Their standard of living won't match ours anytime soon (that's not even possible until we move past the coal/oil-based economy, and even then would require China to take more land from other countries). But per-capita standard of living isn't the whole point; size does matter. They can outcompete is scientifically, militarily, and for natural resources overall, even with lower per-capita productivity.
All nations have to deal with aging demographics. The population pyramid scheme can't continue forever, it simply gets too crowded. China is dealing with it; Americans still seem confused by it and think maybe the solution is massive immigration, or that it's just something wrong with how Social Security is managed.
As a researcher in the physical sciences, I have noticed that nearly all the Chinese groups working my area publish complete crap of no value to other researchers. There are quite a few good Chinese researchers at American universities, but I have not once found a reason to actually cite a group based in China. They have a long way to go still before they reach the same level of impact as any western country (or hell, even its neighbors Korea and Japan).
It's the same in polymer physics and every field. Read this, which puts "leading the world in science" in perspective: http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/will-china-achieve-science-supremacy/?ref=science In short, China tells people they have to publish or perish on a much greater scale than in other countries. As a result, there is a huge amount of published crap.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I am a computer scientist. Asian.
The research condition in China is extremely unhealthy. There are plenty of professors in high places who shamelessly rip off the younger researchers, and cronyism is rampant. Many professors will force the younger members in their group to put their names as first name authors in papers which they do not even read -- because the government's grant committee will only recognize papers with you as the first author. The worst is that the rampant cronyism means that younger researchers have no choice but to comply. That is, professors routinely give great reviews to papers written by buddies, no matter how crap. The same paper (or slightly altered) is published over and over again in different venues.
There is no sense of value whatsoever with these researchers. No pride. No integrity. They exist just to make a living by crushing their opponents doing whatever they can. This is the Wall Street of research. God saves us all.
China consists of a strange mix: two First World territories (Hong Kong and Taiwan), an emergent country (mainly the seaboard) and a large Third World country. In order to become the dominant power, the emergent bit has to become First World and the Third World bit has to become emergent. This is unlike Europe (where the emergent bit is the poorest part) or the US, where the emergent and Third World parts are relatively small and mixed in with the First World part.
On this analysis, China needs to look inwards before it looks outwards. An aggressive war would result in the destruction of the most advanced parts of China, leaving the rest back near the iron age. Europe and the US would be badly damaged but would survive and retain First World capabilities. It is simply not in the Chinese interest to damage its most valuable assets. Just like Mao, they would let the peasants starve first.
* The War of 1812 does not figure in glorious US victories. A coalition of French Canadians, native Americans and the British successfully defended Canada and burned the White House, then the British went on to defeat Napoleon and weaken US power in the Caribbean for many years. The US turned Westwards. So much for Imperialist wars.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Same in Engineering. I have an old professor friend, who is a journal editor. They send the same crap to hundreds of journal, and even though it has no scientific value it will pass the filter by chance. It's much easier to accept than deny, because you don't have to reason. You just don't have the energy and the manpower to politely deny all. And even if you deny, he sends it again next week with very little modification.
But that's not their fault. Science is benchmarked by publications, no matter what is behind them. They just specializing to reach maximum in impact factor and not in real research. It's the same with the TOEFL and GRE. They achieve the maximum score without problems, but it doesn't mean they can speak English at all.