China tops U.S. in quantity and quality of scientific papers(asia.nikkei.com)
asia.nikkei.com
China tops U.S. in quantity and quality of scientific papers
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Science/China-tops-U.S.-in-quantity-and-quality-of-scientific-papers
8 comments
I skim a lot of research papers that pop up in articles here on HN and in other places, and one thing I notice is that papers coming out of the US American universities are overwhelmingly produced by foreign students and researchers originally from India, China, and Europe.
How should one interpret this finding? For example, are Indians and Chinese more ambitious and successful in the USA than others?
China has a lot of brilliant scientists. They also have 1.4 billion people. Not surprising.
And yet Alexa still can't understand the most basic things.
And yet AI can't drive auto's.
And yet we still don't have fundamental understanding of fusion power.
And yet we still don't have full understanding of protein folding or how DNA winds itself up so tightly.
And so many other things that have been issues since forever ago.
The world hasn't had any real significant scientific breakthroughs that change our lives in decades other than incremental improvements on existing technology.
Scientists can pat each other on the back all they want for their awesome papers...wake me up when a scientist finally does something that impacts my life.
And yet AI can't drive auto's.
And yet we still don't have fundamental understanding of fusion power.
And yet we still don't have full understanding of protein folding or how DNA winds itself up so tightly.
And so many other things that have been issues since forever ago.
The world hasn't had any real significant scientific breakthroughs that change our lives in decades other than incremental improvements on existing technology.
Scientists can pat each other on the back all they want for their awesome papers...wake me up when a scientist finally does something that impacts my life.
How are you typing if you are asleep?
Multi tasking. You should try it sometime. ;)
> Research papers are considered higher quality the more they are cited by others.
At one point, links directed to a webpage were considered a metric of quality too, and then we realized that this could be gamed or at least be misleading in some circumstances.
I'm not a member of academia who is embedded deep in the world of research papers every day, but I wouldn't fully trust any metric like this about China without a real deep dive into the numbers and seeing who is doing the citing. Maybe the article goes into it more, but I'm not a subscriber and cannot see.
At one point, links directed to a webpage were considered a metric of quality too, and then we realized that this could be gamed or at least be misleading in some circumstances.
I'm not a member of academia who is embedded deep in the world of research papers every day, but I wouldn't fully trust any metric like this about China without a real deep dive into the numbers and seeing who is doing the citing. Maybe the article goes into it more, but I'm not a subscriber and cannot see.
For example: "Research papers are considered higher quality the more they are cited by others."
This may be true in general, but what if there was a "hack the system" effort whereby academics colluded to promote each others' research... say... in a highly corrupt country.
There has been a long term battle against corruption at universities in China.
For example, a quick search for: china university research corruption
yields several articles. If I had more time today, I'd search for one in particular which compares retracted articles due to discovery of corruption in research, in China, compared to other countries. China's rate was astounding.