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+--- Thread: Article Chinese officials fret about the country's flood of low-quality science papers (/thread-16028.html)
Chinese officials fret about the country's flood of low-quality science papers - C C - Jun 14, 2024
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pressure-top
INTRO: The post here last week about faked papers prompts me to mention this recent publication (which I learned about in Nature): an anonymous survey from inside several Chinese universities. It's quite interesting from that standpoint, and it shows that the Chinese institutions and authorities are indeed becoming worried about the increasing flood of low- (or zero-) quality papers that come from all sorts of Chinese sources. As everyone would have figured, this is a consequence of pressure to Publish, Publish, Publish, and Publish Some More:
. . .this article focuses on China’s plan to build world-class universities and disciplines, titled the World First-Class University and First-Class Academic Discipline Construction (known as the Double First-Class Initiative). The initiative offers significant incentives for individual researchers in elite Chinese universities to produce a rapidly increasing number of articles in top international journals, which has resulted in a swift rise in their world university rankings. On the other hand, the initiative provides ‘organisational reasons’ for wrongdoing, such as unethical research practices. . .
Airing this sort of dirty laundry is not something that any country or any institution ever likes to do, so the bluntness of this article is quite something to see. It takes what it terms "rampant research misconduct" in Chinese science as a given, and then goes on to ask how this spread and what can be done about it... (MORE - details)