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China's Scientists Set New International Record -- For Faked Peer Reviews (nytimes.com)
China now has more laboratory scientists than any other country in the world, reports Amy Qin in the New York Times, and spends more on research than the entire European Union.
But in its rush to dominance, China has stood out in another, less boastful way. Since 2012, the country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories put together, according to Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks and seeks to publicize retractions of research papers... In April, a scientific journal retracted 107 biology research papers, the vast majority of them written by Chinese authors, after evidence emerged that they had faked glowing reviews of their articles. Then, this summer, a Chinese gene scientist who had won celebrity status for breakthroughs once trumpeted as Nobel Prize-worthy was forced to retract his research when other scientists failed to replicate his results. At the same time, a government investigation highlighted the existence of a thriving online black market that sells everything from positive peer reviews to entire research articles...
In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation. But Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system.
In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation. But Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system.
"In part, these numbers may simply reflect the enormous scale of the world's most populous nation. But Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system."
I don't see how these skewed incentives are any different in Western countries.
Sigh... people talk about research money like the researchers themselves actually profit from it. 99% of the time, researcher salary is fixed completely independently of grant money obtained.
Instead, we could actually RTFA, the paragraph after...
As in the West, career advancement can often seem to be based more on the quantity of research papers published rather than the quality. However, in China, scientists there say, this obsession with numerical goal posts can reach extremes. Compounding the problem, they say, is the fact that Chinese universities and research institutes suffer from a lack of oversight, and mete out weak punishments for those who are caught cheating.
Chinese scientists also blame what they call the skewed incentives they say are embedded within their nation's academic system.
It sounds like they have a similar problem to the US's collapsing "publish or perish" paradigm. People should be less focused on what the scientists are doing and focus on the cause of such behavior.
To change the behavior of a group you must correct the feedback loops that control them.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
One thing I see when I look at faked research and retractions of papers is that it often is in biology and medical research or things like sociology. In the hard sciences like physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, meteorology and dare I say it climatology it doesn't seem to happen nearly as often. Maybe it's harder to fake the data in those sciences or maybe there's just more variability open to interpretation in the results from biology/medicine.
I think a big part is that when it's medicine the media is more likely to pick up the story. Jan Hendrik Schön was one of the biggest scandals - but it didn't really make a big splash in the news because solid state physics just isn't something most people get worked up about. Ditto for Adrian Maxim. So unless you are a regular at Retraction Watch, you hear about Wakefield and Hwang Woo-Suk (cloning), but not about physics or engineering fraud.
I also wonder if the problem is really that much worse than it was in the past. Granted, academia is more competitive than it used to be. But really, the big change is that it is so much easier to find fraud than it was in the past. You're right - it is not that hard to make some fake data for a biology paper. You photoshop the picture of your gel (a technique for showing which proteins are present in a sample and whether they are interacting with each other) to show the results you want. 30 or 40 years ago: same thing, though you would have had to do it manually. But now image analysis can catch that easily. Ditto for plagiarism. Ditto for analyzing sets of numbers to see if they were observed or invented. And because it is easier to examine for fraud, and fraud is actually routinely talked about, more people are looking for it than in the past. Now, fraud stands a good chance of being caught. Back then: not so much.