You're right, this article doesn't mention the quality of the research but it seems foolish to ignore this data outright. The point of the article is not comparing china vs. us now but the trend. Even if the quality doesn't improve significantly, if you shoot enough bullets you will hit. We'll get a lot of garbage but also some gems.
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...
This statement seems very exaggerated and not true. It might be true in the field you are in but for example in computer graphics, siggraph is one of the most esteemed journals and there are a couple of papers each year from China (http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2008.html). I would definitely say these papers are not spam and contribute to the field.
It's too easy for us to dismiss these warnings because of China's moral, cultural and politically shortcoming. It seems like a bad idea for us to take the moral high ground every time and bash them for the same things. Instead, let's find ways to improve funding to basic research, work on education reform to improve the quality for K-12 students, increase pay for academics and researchers, etc. Blowing this off and saying "but america is a better place to live" (while almost certainly true right now) is not good enough.
An earlier comment mentioned that that doing research in china was never going to work as well because of censorship issues. This exactly refers to my previous point. Sure, if I was trying to investigate the impact of tiananmen square, I would be crippled. You're going to need more specifics to convince me this negatively affects my ability to do stem cell research. I'm not sure how this is different than nuclear weapon research in the US. I assume you need some security clearance to see our state of the art and this information is "censored" to the general academic community.
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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...
This statement seems very exaggerated and not true. It might be true in the field you are in but for example in computer graphics, siggraph is one of the most esteemed journals and there are a couple of papers each year from China (http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/sig2008.html). I would definitely say these papers are not spam and contribute to the field.
It's too easy for us to dismiss these warnings because of China's moral, cultural and politically shortcoming. It seems like a bad idea for us to take the moral high ground every time and bash them for the same things. Instead, let's find ways to improve funding to basic research, work on education reform to improve the quality for K-12 students, increase pay for academics and researchers, etc. Blowing this off and saying "but america is a better place to live" (while almost certainly true right now) is not good enough.
An earlier comment mentioned that that doing research in china was never going to work as well because of censorship issues. This exactly refers to my previous point. Sure, if I was trying to investigate the impact of tiananmen square, I would be crippled. You're going to need more specifics to convince me this negatively affects my ability to do stem cell research. I'm not sure how this is different than nuclear weapon research in the US. I assume you need some security clearance to see our state of the art and this information is "censored" to the general academic community.