Why fake research is rampant in China

Similarly bad incentives?

Good observation! I think we generally imagine China as an adversary too often. Instead, we should sometimes think of it as a neighbor country, where people that are similar to us are faced with an interesting system.

But I think even then, the best way to understand would be to make comparisons to your own culture.

The article itself already brought that comparison, it's a pro-western outfit dumping on what they consider our adversary.

We could ask why articles like this have multiplied in recent years and that's interesting, but people here are just running with the implied comparison.

What's the point of saying country X has for example vehicle accident rate of y if you don't compare it to other countries? Comparisons are important, otherwise what are you even discussing in a void.

>Who brought up the "west" in this context? and why is it so important?

Anybody interested to see if this is anything special about this case, or just the standard amount that goes on everywhere.

Singling out some country for something that happens everywhere, wouldn't be that different than someone saying "immigrants from X did Y amount of violent crimes" to paint them as particularly violent, when the number might be totally proportional to their share of the population and/or some controls for income level.

> Who brought up the "west" in this context? and why is it so important?

Because the "west", with all its flaws, created the scientific method, also shortened as "science".

Trying to explain science while excluding the Greeks, or Roma, or France, or UK, or Germany, Sweden, Spain, USA, etc... is a total nonsense. Western societies are the standard measure to compare anything related with science, because they were shaped by science.

There's a big difference between "private research intended for public consumption" (marketing / PR / legal), and "private research for private consumption" (R&D / engineering / product development). Companies usually keep the latter to themselves, and the public space gets filled with the former. (To be fair, it's quite possible the first type also has bigger budgets, unfortunately).

I know everywhere it holds a lot of weight, but I think that in Europe/US an additional huge factor for academic career is the ability to raise funding.

Maybe in China there's less need to find private funding for research thus scientific impact based on papers may hold more weight.

But I'm 100% that fake research and cheating is rampant in all of natural science everywhere in the world, and I myself had spent 6 months of my life in a lab trying to reproduce fake results from a previous researcher in my lab.

We only caught up it was fake data way later, when we spotted one single outlier number, an impossibly high voltage generated by his system (a 5/10% open current voltage that compounded all the other results).

There's a specific issue with doctors in China that doesn't exist elsewhere, namely that even for practicing doctors they are required to publish research to get promoted. But that's hard, because they're busy healing people. Cue lots of bought papers that describe medical cases or research that never happened.

I wrote about this in 2021:

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-i-7e9764571422

One Chinese doctor who was rumbled pleaded with the (anonymous) guy who spotted the bad papers:

“Hello teacher, yesterday you disclosed that there were some doctors having fraudulent pictures in their papers. This has raised attention. As one of these doctors, I kindly ask you to please leave us alone as soon as possible.

Being as low as grains of dust of the world, countless junior doctors, including those younger me, look down upon the act of faking papers. But the system in China is just like that, you can’t really fight against it. Without papers, you don’t get promotion; without a promotion, you can hardly feed your family. I also want to have some time to do scientific research, but it’s impossible. During the day, I have outpatient surgeries; after work, I have to take care of my kids. I have only a little bit time to myself after 10 pm, but this is far from being enough because scientific research demands big trunks of time. The current environment in China is like that.

You expose us but there are thousands of other people doing the same. As long as the system remains the same and the rules of the game remain the same, similar acts of faking data are for sure to go on. This time you exposed us, probably costing us our job. For the sake of Chinese doctors as a whole, especially for us young doctors, please be considerate. We really have no choice, please!”

I can't speak to incentives in China, but India had national publication requirements for post grads. These requirements drove an industry of predatory pay-for-publish journals, 'cause you aren't getting your degree without it.

In the US marginal students can take a degree and leave academia without churning out fake garbage.

Same reason why all sorts of gnarly scams (melamine milk, gutter oil, etc) are/were so prevalent in China: there were no consequences. But some of the melamine people were sentenced to death, and the article notes that the government is starting to clamp down on fake research too.

> it doesn’t answer the question of why fake research is so prevalent in China.

"Bad incentives are a big part of the problem."

Honestly, I agree that the article doesn't do a satisfactory job of answering "why?". Simply stating that researchers have an incentive to is true of everywhere.

Yeah I'm just not going to look....

Lol. The history of science is one of extreme graft. The idealized old days you present bear no relationship to what happened.

Unfortunately, you're not wrong. Since a long time, I'm convinced universities need to scale down, and quite a lot too. Higher education, as far as it's needed, should be relegated to schools without a research function. Universities should be primarily research facilities, only training those students who can become good researchers.

That doesn't solve the publication treadmill, but it would expect it to be a step forward.

That's survivorship bias. Of course the results that have survived a century of scrutiny look better than the average high-profile research published today. But there were also plenty of unremarkable and outright false results back in the "good old days", as well as ideologically motivated garbage such as scientific racism. Or Lysenkoism, which killed millions.

What I notice a lot happening is established researchers with reputable pasts wasting funds on research directions that are basically designed to fool the funding agencies and their bosses and their naive PhD students, but which to anyone initiated in the field are obvious dead ends.

The problem is not one of "midwits". The problem is that in science one is supposed to be in search of the truth and nothing but the truth, but we do not reward honesty. We only reward new discoveries or what appears to be new findings. Then it is no wonder that people are being dishonest.

Good point. But please consider that certain cultures may be inherently more transparent and accepting of dissent (see global indices that measure freedom of speech and degree of liberal democracy). Plus, different cultures have different attitudes towards honesty and commitment to truth (e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17160). In addition, the last decade saw the emergence of colossal national programs that explicitly seek to inflate output metrics (e.g. China, Saudi Arabia, etc.).

I’d trust a paper coming out of the Netherlands way more than I’d trust one from China. For the same reasons I’d trust a paper from a reputable publisher over predatory one.

Good old days like lying about sugar and tobacco? The unscientific racism in the US and Germany? Lusenkoism?

If any, from 1970 we got RMS, Linus Torvalds, GCC, Emacs, Gnuplot, Perl, Python, BLAS/Lapack and so boosting scientific research to unthinkable levels...

Would second these observations …

Replication crisis != poorly done studies != fake research. Related, but not the same.

Research may fail to replicate for many reasons. Especially in areas like social science. Test subject (person) randomly selected from a population in say, the '50s, was different from similarly selected test subject today.

Bad incentives & outright fakery just add to that mix of possible causes.

Hyper competition and perverse incentives is present in western academia also. The only difference is in the amount, not if it is present or not at all. I don’t get how a bunch of HN readers could fall into the trap of binary thinking.