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Comment by gareim | Hacker News Reader

They may spend more and write more eventually, but until they fix the quantity vs. quality problem, the numbers mean very little. According the Reuters, the money Beijing is pouring into research is incentivizing low quality science articles.

"According to data gathered by the OECD, China produced 285,000 papers in 2009. That's about 0.2 papers per 1,000 head of the population. Just 0.05 percent were published in top journals.

By comparison, the United States published 473,000 papers, or 1.6 for every 1,000 people. More than half made it into top journals."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/28/us-science-china-i...

Will China eventually surpass the US? Probably. They're modernizing quickly and they have 5 times our population. If they can't one day surpass us, something is deeply wrong. Of course, with their government the way it is today, there could be major hurdles along the way.

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I recently did some copyediting for a chinese econ PhD student in the US. She isn't a student at my university, or even a research assistant. She's just a guest, who is being partially supervised by professors in our econ department.

Why is she here? In order to graduate from china with a PhD, you have to publish a paper in a specific list of journals. If you're unable to do so in a certain time period, you either aren't awarded a PhD, or you have to find a university in the US which will take you for 2 years. After those two years, you have to have your dissertation completed, and the US professors have to vouch for you in lieu of publication.

This is just an example of some of the problems you're talking about. Each PhD student (as far as she's described to me) who gets their degree without going abroad MUST have their dissertation published. This is totally contrary to how it occurs in the US where you simply have to come up with a thesis and defend it--there are rarely requirements about publishing.

Whats more is, if you asked a US professor to talk about the problems with academic publishing in the US, or with tenure, or whatever, its that all these incentives line up for people to publish publish publish. Its not about substance--its publish publish publish. Throw enough papers at the wall and you hope to god one sticks long enough for you to get tenure.

If this is a major complaint in the US, you can just imagine how bad it must be in Asia, where theres an (at least this is my understanding) real problem with 'faking it until you make it', with the hope that you'll learn enough to keep up with the Jones', while doing the bare minimum of substance or risk taking to meet expectations.

"there are rarely requirements about publishing."

Ha. [Hollow Laugh] If only that were actually true. Even in departments were there is no "official" requirement, in practice there is. Your advisor will tell you baldly publish well or don't find a good job afterwards. Most students who are not on track drop out instead of getting a pity degree.

"Its not about substance--its publish publish publish."

Sometimes true, in practice grants are far more important than quantity of publications. To get grants you have to be respected and known in your field. That means not dumping a bunch of bad publications out, it means making meaningful contributions. It also helps to be a persuasive writer.

"Throw enough papers at the wall and you hope to god one sticks long enough for you to get tenure."

I know specific people who were denied tenure even though they had great publication records. Once again it is about grants, not publications.

I don't mean to try to sum up the entirety of academia in my post, just some issues relevant to the topic at hand. Your experience, much like my post, isn't exhaustive. Have I said something wrong that should be debunked?

I think he answered that question already in his comment, in extenso.

i couldn't tell if he was trying to assert something as truth and contribute, or if he was just venting his graduate student frustrations.

The whole 'top journals' concept may not be the best thing to use as a metric.

You can make "top journals" quantitative with metrics like impact factor. And even though that's not a perfect system, having a difference of three orders of magnitude (.05% to 50+%) means that there really is a meaningful difference in the quality of papers.

Is there a language issue? (I assume all the top journals are international and English, but are there also Chinese language journals which are influential in China but not considered "top" globally?)

If you have top quality work, where are you going to publish it?

If you have quality work and a big enough local market for it, where are you going to publish?

It's kind of like comparing the %-age of American versus Chinese actors who work in Hollywood versus the Chinese film industry.

Some material might also be most relevant within China, or where the users are Chinese language primarily, so it would make more sense to publish locally -- Chinese history, current politics, maybe some specific economic articles around China, potentially things related to major Chinese engineering works like the new space program, etc.

(Still no idea if language is even a factor, but it seems plausible.)

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