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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.
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
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.
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.