The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out sham science
nature.com
nature.com
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
I'd love to see a review of all researchers with high H-indexes. I bet you would see a disproportionately high incidence of self citing, citing rings, journal bias, outright corruption and much more.
But the bigger problem is that many of these people are highly intelligent and capable. When they are told that their careers depend on a gameable metric, they can figure out clever ways to game it.
Mountains of paper don't improve the human condition, we need better success metrics.
I'm sure my H-index is great, but it's completely bogus. Some organizations have stopped counting papers with over some number of authors (i.e. 1000) which is progress, but by that metric I'm the author on zero papers a year.
Are you asked for permission to be added as an author?
What if the research was 'bogus' or at least parts of it were incompetently/poorly done and the paper is discredited.
The question about bogus science is an interesting one: In theory by putting 3000 authors on every paper the collaboration we are ensuring more scrutiny for every result. And indeed, our internal review is far more rigorous than the peer review that we get from the journal. As far as I know, no journal has ever rejected a paper from ATLAS or CMS, which is a pretty good track record for O(thousands) of papers.
There is a flip-side, of course: this system also hinders innovation. When 3000 people are "authors" on your result, any one of them can to hold it back from publication. We tend to do choose more conservative techniques in the interest of getting anything at all past internal review.
Personally, I don't think aiming for a 100% success rate in publication is a healthy way to do fundamental research. I'd rather see some slightly questionable papers submitted to journals now and then, since lowering the bar to get to that stage would mean making more interesting ideas public.
Perhaps its lucky I don't work in physics funding or recruitment.
You reminded me of this classic paper: https://improbable.com/airchives/classical/articles/peanut_b...
(My name moved from the end of the alphabet to the middle when I married. I was amused that it actually makes a difference).
The worst thing to have is indicator counting of any kind. The system will be swamped with mediocre, sometimes almost fraudulent scientists who game it. (It's just too easy to game the system: Just find a bunch of friends who put their names on your papers, and you do the same with their papers, and you've multiplied your "results".)
H-Index is also flawed. In my area in the humanities papers and books are often quoted everywhere because they are so bad. I know scholars who have made a career by publishing outrageous and needlessly polemic books and articles. Everybody will jump on the low-hanging fruit, rightly criticize this work, the original authors get plenty of opportunities to publish defences, and then they get their tenure. Publishers like Oxford UP know what sells and are actively looking for crap like that.
A tool which was used to resolve issues among chemists and biologists is now running rampant over fields which do not have a high volume of citations. Mathematics is suffering, for example.
An Annals of Math paper might have fewer citations than a paper in Journal of Applied Statistics. But the prestige is incomparable.
This is purely by convention.
part of this is contingent upon citation formats used in different kinds of publications (and thus different fields) where long lists of authors are condensed to one two or three at most.
this is not even getting into more locally scoped, second order inputs such as any given department's traditional handling of advisor vs. grad student power dynamics.
Yeah... maybe if you were on a meth IV drip and lived for 200 years...
Another point is that to get to this volume the "researcher" probably have many papers that he/she had no part in. Not even formulating the problem. In the case of physicians I encountered senior doctors who just conditioned using the department's medical statistics on adding him/her as author. That is, every paper that uses this specific public medical data adss this author regardless of their contribution... (To be clear they not even necessarily have anything to do with the data collection beyond what they already are obligated to do at the hospit, just happen to be responsible on managing access it)
Quite common in Biology and Chemistry.
Less common in theoretical physics.
Of course all these people are mega smart and do fab research - but they got lucky, and there were lots of others who were as smart and got pushed out.
I'd argue the problem is the concept of "metric" in itself. You can't measure complex human endeavors with a simple objective number. Whenever the concept pops up (lines of code, anyone?), it's always a disaster.
My h-index is 13.
If you had sixty papers that have each been cited more than sixty times, you'll still have those sixty papers even if you publish a new paper that gets cites only once.
If I’m sat in Einstein’s office doing a performance review with him, I’d probably say “Yes, Alf, you’ve done pretty well these last few years. Keep it up.” Don’t think I’d need a metric. And if he came to me for funding for a postdoc I’d say - yes, sure.
I don’t know when we decided that _management_ had to be replaced with _metrics_ but it doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Management involves doing things that don’t scale, that’s why we have lots of managers.
If you only fund the more established researchers, then new researchers are starved out and more likely to leave the field. However, my belief is that new researchers are more likely to develop big new innovations than (say) the really old professors that are well past their prime.
You also have another related problem: given a large pool of new researchers, who are the ones that will be really good? Plus, there are other possible goals, like spreading the money around to broaden the base of researchers.
Reasonable question with no precise answer, but I imagine a manager would seek a balance between the two as with any company or team. Some big hitters but you've got to see where your next Einsteins are coming from.
There's nothing about this that is solved by metrics. Metrics just help you might shallow decisions quickly, and provide ways for academics to game the system by manipulating those metrics.
That is to say, whatever worked for him or that era wont work for contemporary person today.
"Ah yes, Jimmy Postdoc, I see you have published 3 papers with an average impact factor of 3.1. Have a promotion."
vs
"Ah yes, Jimmy Postdoc, I see that you're making progress in improving quantum error correction, as evidenced by the fact that we can now use 80% of the previously required qubits to complete Shor's factoring assuming a surface code - great work, you should get that paper out at some point but keep focused on the work for now.
I'm also really pleased with your contribution to the academic community in the dept, particularly helping out Polly PhD student with her SAT formulation of decoding. The constructive questions in her talk really opened up a new line of enquiry. Great job.
Given all the above, have a promotion."
Metrics are stupid, people are smart, stop using stupid.
The question you have to ask yourself is whether you are prepared to tolerate occasional suboptimal decisions for a metrics based evaluation that _corrupts the entire system_.
That might work in a company but not in the academic world. Many countries limit the amount of time a PhD student or Postdoc researcher can stay at a university. After that time the person has to find a permanent contract (professor) if they want to stay. Because there are many many more candidates than available positions, the hiring committees try to justify their decisions by objective (haha) criteria.
Moreover, you essentially make the career of some very intelligent people depend on this arbitrary metric that you have created, what do you expect to happen? Obviously they will work to that metric, which then people complain about they are gaming the system. No, they actually work toward the metric that you (not you personally obviously) have created.
[0]https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdfplus/10.1308/rcsbull....
It seems that there is a particular brand of ultra-pragmatism and rule-gaming that is overrepresented in China.
Researchers are judged on published papers? Publish papers that appear just good enough to be published, ignore everything else. Products are bought based on looks on price? Make a cheap product that appears just good enough to be sold, ignore everything else.
I don't mean to stereotype all of China negatively. I've worked with enough amazing Chinese colleagues to understand this is not all of China. I'm just curious if this pattern has some truth to it or if it's just a random racist stereotype, and how it can be explained.
Also what you described are characteristics of any poorer country. They'll try to get some money from wealthier places in the easiest way possible (Indian IT scams, Nigerian prince scams, etc). For most of the last century and even until today China is still a lot poorer than the US. It's also a massive country. It's easy to discount the 1.4 billion Chinese population because a lot of them are dirt poor still.
For a start, many of the Chinese factories making low-quality, cheap goods are instructed by Western IP holders to do so. You see the same thing in many industries no matter where they're manufactured - textiles is the biggest example that springs to mind, but fast food would be another. Hell, I reduce quality to minimise costs in my business (second-hand games; we'll bundle third-party controllers with the console because the consumer doesn't care, and sell the genuine item separately at a premium).
At the status-grabbing level, look at the number of Indian students graduating with CompSci/IT degrees that can't even write FizzBuzz. Look at all of the upper-middle-class white people in the West who get their below-average intelligence children into bullshit middle management positions just so they can boast about their child being high-status at dinner parties. Look at all of the "entrepreneurs" out there who take outrageous risks with their parents' money and are actively encouraged to do so "because at least they're doing something with their life". Look at your local members of parliament. Look at Facebook and Google. Look at your friendly neighbourhood OnlyFans thot.
Everyone is gaming the system, not just the Chinese.
I live in the West and not sure I've ever even been to a bona fide dinner party. How does one get a grown child into a middle management position? You mean nepotism?
Over-represented means more than elsewhere. Not something you can disprove with some examples.
I have also worked with the Chinese, and yes in my experience they are much more likely to try and be "clever" by putting something over on you than others. Japanese are very different people to deal with. Part of it surely is that China is developing and the lines are still blurry in acceptable business behavior. But I think their history (of eliminating capitalism then having to rebuild a culture of it from scratch) plays a role too.
Exactly this. It's not the Chinese factories that choose the quality level of the product - it's the companies that design and order them. Yes, the factories can and will cheat if they think they can get away with it, but roughly - they'll produce things at the quality level they're ordered to and paid to produce. The deluge of crap on the West is and always has been the fault of the Western companies that commission their production.
(And as a somewhat obvious proof of that point: all the high-quality stuff we buy and use? Almost all of it is made in China too.)
Well it does beat spending that money on drugs and hookers
This is just the result of very strong competition.
The only reason things aren't crap in other places is because things are less competitive (due to lower stakes) and people have a desire to make good things (particularly if they have strong cultural values relating to this) and do good work which can rise to the top of the priority list if competition isn't too fierce.
The stakes in China are high and were even higher in the past. And values of quality have been sacrificed due to how high competition was back then and those who sacrificed quality are now successful, leading others to immitate them. Quality is likely to improve in the future once people become more secure and the people who were most ruthless in the most competitive times start dying off.
"We were taught in school about Mao, who rose to power on idealism. At first he showed us many great things that we could do, but eventually idealism led us to the great famine, and many people starved. Since then, Mao lost some power, and now in school they teach us that Mao was 2/3 right, but 1/3 wrong. And that 1/3 that was wrong was idealism. So now we practice pragmatism."
If anything, traditional Chinese culture has elements which are heavily anti-pragmatic. Tao-te-ching Verse 3 begins with not praising meritorious people, to prevent envy/fraud (depending on the translation).
[3] https://www.taoistic.com/taoteching-laotzu/taoteching-03.htm
Central government wants to incentivize innovation and research so huge Chinese (and homogenized) population starts spamming patents and research papers. The system generates expertise for 1 good patent or paper out of 10. But volume is so high that 1/10 is enough to be globally competitive. Refine quality to 2/10 to reach parity. Refine to 3/10 and China becomes industrial leader. It's not hard to go from 1-3/10 in a short span of time when you have a massive labour force spamming its way into maturity. This is how China went from having poor academic research capacity into leading research many fields relatively fast if one looks past the "culture" / incidental inefficiencies and evaluate based on metrics controlled for quality. Supercharge this with industrial policy and state coordination to target strategic sectors.
It's the optimal development strategy that plays to PRC strengths - lots of people, somewhat competent ability to coordinate. In terms of fast, cheap, good, developing countries don't get to be good anyway, frequently poor governance = can't even focus on fast or cheap let alone both. Coordinating both = Deng model: poor China develops cheap and fast aka chabuduo. So Chinese population + spamming chabuduo + coordination = enough occasional, actually good outcomes to reach global competitiveness in ways that matter, fast. Though eventually need to reign in cheating and corruption via parallel improvements in coordination and culture to move onto next tier. Whatever you think of Xi, this is what he's been focusing on. Building premier institutions is also just hard and takes time to cultivate, especially if intellectuals previously purged, so need to spam out all the necessary components first anyway. Can't exactly have leading institutions without pool of experts first. The only place to cut corners for building institutions is to generate excess talent/components and assemble accordingly. Excess talent also necessary to mitigate brain drain (your amazing colleagues).
Elsewhere, Chabuduo manufacturing with Chinese population means plastic hangers to iPhones in 10 years. Chabuduo construction means enviable transportation systems, tier1 cities from fishing villages, and ghost cities that eventually gets filled by the hundreds of millions still waiting to be urbanized. Perfect/Good is the enemy of fast development.
> This is how China went from having poor academic research capacity into leading research many fields relatively fast if one looks past the "culture" / incidental inefficiencies and evaluate based on metrics controlled for quality. Supercharge this with industrial policy and state coordination to target strategic sectors.
I'm sorry but this makes no sense. When using existing research and literature, even one wrong article can screw over a whole project. Chinese academic research is viewed with high skepticism to say the least, and often laughed at when cited as credible. Chabuduo has no place in science. There's a good reason they rely heavily on stealing research and technology even to this day; because they don't even trust their own researcher.
> It's the optimal development strategy that plays to PRC strengths - lots of people, somewhat competent ability to coordinate. In terms of fast, cheap, good, developing countries don't get to be good anyway, frequently poor governance = can't even focus on fast or cheap let alone both. Coordinating both = Deng model: poor China develops cheap and fast aka chabuduo. So Chinese population + spamming chabuduo + coordination = enough occasional, actually good outcomes to reach global competitiveness in ways that matter, fast.
China's growth was helped mainly by huge positive trade deficits caused by protectionist policies and the huge active commercial help of foreign country who tolerated said protectionism (until now) and complete disregard for long term consequences. Sure, focus your population on work instead of raising children, disregard regulations so you have an economy based on tofu buildings and rotting ghost cities and basically no social programs to take care of your elderly population facing a demographic catastrophe and screw over nearly all countries who dealt with you in good faith so they all have active programs to migrate their production out of your country.
> Building premier institutions is also just hard and takes time to cultivate, especially if intellectuals previously purged, so need to spam out all the necessary components first anyway. Can't exactly have leading institutions without pool of experts first. The only place to cut corners for building institutions is to generate excess talent/components and assemble accordingly. Excess talent also necessary to mitigate brain drain (your amazing colleagues).
Nah the Chinese just outsourced that with industrial espionage.
> Elsewhere, Chabuduo manufacturing with Chinese population means plastic hangers to iPhones in 10 years. Chabuduo construction means enviable transportation systems, tier1 cities from fishing villages, and ghost cities that eventually gets filled by the hundreds of millions still waiting to be urbanized. Perfect/Good is the enemy of fast development.
Your cities are polluted, your cancer and chronic disease rates are through the roof, your factories have anti-suicide nets, you have to spy on your population so they don't rebel... I mean what's the fucking benefit? Sure iPhones 16 are cheap, but also mostly unnecessary and could be / is being outsourced elsewhere (China is facing a chip shortage by the way, again screwing over other countries wasn't such a good long term strategy was it?) Your Chabuduo constructions are crumbling. Your government has to actively supress news of buildings collapsing, elsewhere this would make national news. And no your ghost cities are not being settled "by the hundreds of millions" (lol, hundred of millions, that's like the number of people having to hunt rats and do subsistence farming to survive and I wish I was kidding). "Good enough" means you can sustain your future, but cheap stuff that breaks from toys to academic papers always end up costing more.
Also, while I have you: when accounts use HN primarily for political, ideological, or nationalistic battle, we ban them. That's a standard moderation test on HN, because such accounts are clearly no longer in using HN as intended, i.e. for curious conversation on intellectually interesting topics. It looks like your account is hovering on the edge of that. I don't want to ban you, so please go the other way.
My talking points are mostly from subject matter experts with good track record. Yours is generic youtube wisdom from ADVChina and laoway86.
> makes no sense.
Tell that to various international global rankings in innovation / research indexes that controls for quality and impact factors. China starting to lead in many strategic high tech fields. High impact research doesn't seem to have a problem citing Chinese papers. Espionage built the base and fills in gaps. Combine with domestic research = rapidly propelling Chinese RD competitiveness. Whine all you like, strategy is working and reflected in reality. Not to mention industrial policy is modelled after west, China likes to copy what works after all, it just learned to play the same game well.
> China's growth was helped mainly
Yet it grew to 2nd largest economy, 1st by PPP measures. Model worked in China but not India who had better starting conditions. China had exceptionally onerous WTO accession protocols, sanctions and other geopolitical hindrances. Ultimately it's about playing cards that are dealt, which were much less charitable than your fantasies. CCP just managed cards competently and continues to, seeing how FDI is up, minimum amount of foreign companies are moving out despite cold war, Chinese companies expanding abroad, trade deals being signed, further entangling more economies to Chinese supply chains. Demographic crisis overblown, China's a medium income country with plenty of room to grow, enough cheap surplus labour to maintain infrastructure and negotiate demographic transition. Meanwhile western infrastructure actually rotting, living standards are declining. See which countries are actually losing shit over economic anxiety, fracturing over immigration to maintain unsustainable safety nets and coping with rants like yours. China isn't a developed country, it's not going to deal with developing country problems based on poor projection. Poor Chinese are going to die poor, but still richer than they were. That's an arguable easy crisis to deal with than pervasive decline in QOL in west.
> outsourced that with industrial espionage
Again refer to steady upward trend of Chinese academic institutions. China only middle-income country to break top rank. Mid-ranking universities have converged and started to outperform mid-ranking western institutions. It's just getting started.
> what's the fucking benefit
Just 40x increase in economy since 90s and massive aggregate QoL improvements I guess. Maybe also triggering folks like you. Hundred millions = urbanization rate from 60% -> 70% by 2025... then onto 80%. That's 300M people... Remind me how much surplus units there are? Obviously some waste, but broadly oversupply was planned as part of general urbanization strategy trying to get rid of subsistent farmers kept around for stability maintenance.
> always end up costing more
Said every China collapse proponents every year for the past 30 years, yet somehow China is now a viable strategic competitor to US.
> Chabuduo constructions are crumbling
Actually worked in construction field in China / West. Residential developments in North America failing as much as ones I've worked on in China. Except China builds it cheaper and faster. BTW most of South Korea has shitty construction quality due to rapid development. It's been decades, unsurprisingly not actually an existential problem. Not to mention the amount of seemingly unworkable starchitect designs in tier1/2 cities that are doing fine. Hint: construction isn't rocket science. Some accidents as result of building more than the world combined or US in last 100 years is negligible. I'll take that over NIMBYism stagnant infrastructure/development any day.
Moreover, you're not just defending, you're playing the same flamewar game that the others are, with tedious "no you" disparagement and name-calling about the West which mirror the things you're objecting to. That's not cool.
Worse yet, you're crossing into personal attack. I know how difficult it is to resist these temptations, but everyone who posts here has to follow the rules. You're breaking them, and we need you to fix that. Whether you're breaking them as badly as the next person is irrelevant.
I've put a ton of time and energy into the difficult task of convincing HN commenters to be level-headed and decent when addressing China/West geopolitics during this time of heightened propaganda and nascent enmity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... I've stood up repeatedly for HN's Chinese users, and/or users of Chinese descent, and/or users who have a family or business background in China, for their right to share what they know on the site and not be attacked or hounded off. What you're doing here, unfortunately, undermines that.
If you want to post in the spirit of sharing knowledge and helping to overcome ignorance and prejudice, you're welcome to do that. If you're just fighting a nationalistic battle from the minority side, that's as bad as the comments you're objecting to, and you're damaging this site. That's not ok.
I realize this asks more of you in terms of dignity and self-control than it asks of the users who are in the majority position and therefore under less pressure. That's not fair, but it's how group dynamics work, it's the same all over the world, and it isn't going to change—we have to play the cards we're dealt. If you can find it in yourself to post in a spirit of respect and patience, no matter how ignorant others are or you feel they are, that would be lovely. But if all you're after is "triggering folks", we're going to end up banning you. I don't want to ban you, so would be grateful if you'd please fix this. Currently, you're giving ammunition to the lame and foolish accusations that we're trying hard to combat here.
If you do want to help overcome ignorance and increase understanding, here are two things you can specifically do that would help a lot: (1) find things to agree with in the comment you're replying to—this is nearly always possible (if not, you probably shouldn't be replying), and establishes respect and good faith. (2) Scrupulously eliminate every trace of pejorative language from your own posts, regardless of how wrong the other comment is or you feel it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt%E2%80%93shame%E2%80%93fe...
Translation: It only really matters if you're caught going something wrong by your peers or society at large. There are recent, but also ancient origins which define this culture. The west (western and especially northern europe, etc.) is broadly a cultural outlier anthropologically, which are guilt societies.
> 仰不愧於天, 俯不怍於人 - Looking up, no shame toward the heaven; looking down, no shame facing others.
That is, Confucian "shame" is not something you feel when you are found out. It's what you feel when you look inward at yourself, in front of the heaven. It's closer to what Europeans would call "sin".
Let's not single out China though. I've read pretty much the same happens in Japan. It might be that the source of this ends up being Confucianism and historical influences of China, but it extends to other countries outside it. The whole "saving face" and outward appearances, etc.
Everyone I've ever seen doing something wrong in the west only showed "guilt" once caught.
Do you not feel guilt yourself?
If there’s a cultural issue here then it’s a management/leadership one.
I don’t think the average westerner would be any different if their future employment required that they have something published.
And, I know it would never happen, but if FAANG companies were to all decide that the number of published papers would be key in hiring decisions then this place would be full of people looking for the quickest/easiest way to get the number up.
Putting an entire country through famines and encouraging paranoid political denunciations will squeeze out any concern to ethics and altruism out of any society.
In their eyes, when someone gets scammed, the scammer is smart and the victim dumb and deserves what happened to him. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was facilitated by the PLA as a form of Unrestricted Warfare.
This isn't particularly Chinese, though. Let me clear: by far, most researchers who "make it" in academia are very capable and very highly deserving of their careers. However, it is quite obvious that you can also advance your career by cynically focusing your research in exactly the way you say.
This is not often blamed on Leninism, which to me is weird, because of the frequency with which Leninist polities show cults of personality, multi-decade tenures of heads of state, micromanagement of media and public communications, and use of public shaming as a tool to control mid-ranking mopes. And of course, I don't need to explain what a struggle session is.
If the governance and judicial practice consistently obeys the maxim that popularity = good and shame = bad, it doesn't seem surprising that that value system would reappear in the proletariat. Proponents of "radically democratic" systems would be wise to consider ways to mitigate this phenomenon.
As with anything, it's complicated, and I don't understand things well enough to really synthesize it any better.
https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/13740469245510328...
We hear about some Chinese examples, but this happens also in Europe.
Indeed, fake paper factories are a thing in Western democracies as well. In Latin America, for example.
The best way forward is probably some metric of reproducibility. Can your paper/experiment be reproduced? Has anyone done so? Did they succeed or fail? Did they publish their results? That would quickly separate the wheat from the chaff.
Could have this so that it's a multi-stage process where all involved parties become authors on the paper, but this would need a substantial shift in what academia is today.
Also, I’d love to see the Masters degree become focused on reproducing others work for two years. You do original research in a PhD only.
Debunking science also brings value to science. The incentivizes of the system needs to change.
As an analogy, performing code review brings value to software development.
These ideas itself are valid but not nuanced. I could also argue that academic publishing as at its most successful ever with science advancing at an incredible pace even as complexity is so high, and I could argue that everyone is now thinking about reproducibility and it's baked into the academic process these days (for decades, having another lab reproduce your paper is critical to it being accepted by the community even after being accepted for publication).
Maybe an analogy I would use it if I were to say "software is so broken, the quality is getting worse over time, new programmers can't fizzbizz, security bugs everywhere, no one can even reliably make a heathcare website or computer game on time." Same argument that you're making.
I wish it was more common to cite a paper and the first few attempts at reproducing it side by side.
It would reward the reproducibility study with a lot of citations and reinforce the credibility of the cited original paper, because the reader now knows that the results quoted have been certified elsewhere.
Sure it can be gamed, but if you see $shady_institution and the reproducibility study was made by $other_shady_institution you can still draw your own conclusions...
Obscure supplements or herbal medicines are a common target for these papers. The more obscure the topic, the less likely the authors are to encounter conflicting results. So you end up with streams of papers showing that various herbal remedies or supplements show efficacy against COVID or cancer or other hot topic issues.
Supplement producers love this because it creates demand for their products. In some cases, I've been shocked to discover that the same researchers who published these papers are now marketing their own proprietary blend of those supplements. They create both the supply and the demand.
Well, fakes aside, legitimate pharmaceutical researchers should also be expected to do this, right?
https://www.dartsch-scientific.com/ https://www.powerinsole.com/science-en/?lang=en https://www.memon.eu/blog/schutz-hochfrequente-strahlung-ele...
China just has a disproportionate impact because of the size. It's not unique, and the comments talking about this being some aspect of China or the character of the Chinese are, I think, missing the mark. This is just humans responding to clear incentives.
Hugh no, fake papers and total disregard to ethics in general has always been a huge problem in China. Remember, China is still a poor contrary to what they claim, and its academic population is therefore small in comparison the rest of the developed world.
"Is there a good analysis somewhere of pragmatism in Chinese culture?"
"I lived in China for 6 months. This fits my experience, and is remarkably similar to a story I was told by a native Chinese: 'We were taught in school about Mao, who rose to power on idealism. At first he showed us many great things that we could do, but eventually idealism led us to the great famine, and many people starved. Since then, Mao lost some power, and now in school they teach us that Mao was 2/3 right, but 1/3 wrong. And that 1/3 that was wrong was idealism. So now we practice pragmatism.'"
"In China, the concept of shame [in contrast to guilt] is widely accepted due to Confucian teachings"
"ADV China talk about this a lot. China is basically a low trust society where amoral opportunism is not only tolerated but also expected, as long its 'chabuduo' (just good enough)."
etc. etc.
It's just as silly to talk about that as it would be to talk about the inherent pragmatism of the Tanzanians.
It is, again, just people responding to very clear incentives, and the market rising to meet them.
I feel like this is less a problem of serious science (where it's generally known what authors and journals are reliable, and where people using the results of others know enough to subject them to scruitiny). It is a problem of the publishing industry and of evaluating academics for tenure and promotion.
Trusting only the work of specific authors may not be a bad strategy, albeit quite conservative. But trusting work because of the journal or the university it came from is way more likely to yield misses IMO. Not saying there isn't a correlation, just that there's still plenty of bad science going on at supposedly top institutions. And I've lost count of how many times a supposedly big result published in Nature or Science just quietly drops off the face of the earth. No rebuttal or retraction, but 10 years go by and nobody in another lab does any real followup on a seemingly cool result? I find that quite sketchy.
Biology papers are especially bad at not releasing raw data or detailed methodology, so in some cases it's not possible for even a very educated person to evaluate the quality of the work from reading the paper. There's definitely some trust that goes into it, probably too much given how oversubscribed/hypercompetitive that field is.
Joe Rogan interviewed two of the people involved in this project: https://youtu.be/OlqU_JMTzd4
More about Scientific Reports controversies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Reports
That controversies page was surprisingly entertaining overall though, I have to say. Clearly the authors don't even take the journal seriously: "The face of Donald Trump was hidden in an image of baboon feces in a paper published in 2018. The journal later removed the image."
People see only the domain name nature.com and think it's quality source.
It seems that the incentive of a journal is to maintain an appearance of legitimacy, rather than actually enforcing it. This is why, as the article mentions, journals tend to be fairly quiet about retractions and issues of misconduct.
There is a better incentive by those that are funding the research (the taxpayers/government) that their investments are resulting in legitimate works. This also goes in line with the idea that these final manuscripts should be freely available to the public. Now with that said, I also acknowledge that the idea of having the NIH, NSF. etc. operate the editorial and review process would be nightmarish.
I suspect there would be a lot less research, but perhaps whatever papers made it to the finish line, they would be much more meaningful ?
R&D is always going to be a sunk cost, especially when exploring "new frontiers". Funding people to "waste their time" going down different uncharted paths - with most of them leading to dead-ends - is still the only way to have a few return with new insight from those paths that led to new and wondrous areas.
You can already see this at the scale of "what" government chooses to fund. For years they have funded cancer research which has made many advances, but they did not fund "ageing" research anywhere close to as much. Recent advances in the latter have shown this to be a promising field, but imagine the advances we could have had had this been funded to the same extent that cancer research has!
I also think it's really relevant to this particular discussion; the added emphasis on attempted replication probably wouldn't prevent paper mills from working period, but they could drastically increase the cost of good forgeries and create an environment of accountability that could potentially make their use by researchers much more risky, which might drop their use even further. Of course, publishers could help as well; maybe only the most innovative papers that have been replicated by unaffiliated third parties that have been provided with the pre-print or low-impact initial publication get re-published in the higher-impact journals, and those that can't get watermarked with with "unable to be reproduced x of y times."
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/escaping-sciences-paradox/
You can get fake teeth, fake hair, fake boobs, fake tan, fake muscles, support fake charities that take 98% for themselves. Read fake news and vote for fake politicians that will tell you sweet lies to make your fake self feel better. Fakery is only growing more popular.
In principle, why should we care who makes a particular claim? The claim should be decided on its own merits.
It would be hard to evaluate a researcher's abilities if one couldn't read her papers.
In the contrary case, which is a separate issue - that of hiring a scientist, in every other arena, employees are hired based on interviews and testing, with some consideration given to past experience - but this is more and more, especially on the cutting edge, the least pertinent concern.
In science however, employees are hired sometimes entirely based upon their "experience", with little to no consideration given to their presently-assessable ability.
If I were to hire a research scientist, I would far prefer to test potential suitors by having them walk through the conducting of research in front of me. Many, however, would balk - indignant, and stand proud on their legacy of papers instead.
This gives me no idea of their actual ability, and taken on face-value - ignoring tradition and dogma - is actually a red-flag.