China's Research Problem

Chinese researchers are not very well compensated compared to their Western counterparts. However, they can increase their income by a factor of 10 with a single publication. The better the journal they publish in, as judged by the average number of times that its papers are cited, the more money they make.

Some research institutions follow a simple formula for determining cash rewards: 10,000 yuan, multiplied by one plus the journal impact factor (the impact factor reflects average citation levels). For example, publication in The Lancet, whose impact factor was 39.06 in 2012, would fetch 400,600 yuan (About $65,000). By comparison, the average yearly income of Chinese scientific researchers was 39,850 yuan in 2007. A 2004 survey found that 43 percent of scientific researchers said this kind of performance-linked pay accounted for more than 50 percent of their income, reports Naomi Ching. (1) But the requirement to publish in these journals is also resented. A watershed moment came in 2011 when the well-known chemist Nai-Xing Wang published an editorial in Nature claiming that “chemistry research in China has turned into a Vanity Fair” because of the obsession with impact factors. “If a high impact factor is the only goal of chemistry research, then chemistry is no longer science. It is changed to a field of fame and game.” (2) Another aspect of scientific publishing in China are fake articles which are sold to academics and counterfeit versions of existing medical journals. Gady Epstein reports, “As China tries to take its seat at the top table of global academia, the criminal underworld has seized on a feature in its research system: the fact that research grants and promotions are awarded on the basis of the number of articles published, not on the quality of the original research. This has fostered an industry of plagiarism, invented research and fake journals that Wuhan University estimated in 2009 was worth $150 million, a fivefold increase compared to just two years earlier.” The cost of placing an article in one of the counterfeit journals was as high as $650. Purchasing a fake article could cost up to $250. Criminals have earned several million yuan ($500,000. or more) since 2009. Customers were typically medical researchers angling for promotion. (3)

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By volume, the output of Chinese science is impressive. From 2002 to 2012 more than 1 million Chinese papers were published in Science Citation Index (SCI) journals; they ranked sixth for the number of times cited by others. The journal Nature reported that in 2012 the number of papers from China in the journal's 18 affiliated research publications rose by 35% from 2011. The journal said this 'adds to the growing body of evidence that China is fast becoming a global leader in scientific publishing and scientific research.' In 2010, however, Nature also noted rising concerns about fraud in Chinese research, reporting that in one Chinese government survey, a third of more than 6,000 scientific researchers at six leading institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification or fabrication. (3) Chinese businesses increased their R&D spending by 26.2 percent per year between 1996 and 2010. The number of patents that America's own patent office had granted to Chinese inventors rose 4,628 percent between 1996 and 2010. Lee Branstetter asks, What is going on here? (4) The answer is that multinational corporations, not Chinese firms, own the majority of the US patents that were issued during this recent boom. In other words, Chinese indigenous companies still lag behind their multinational competitors in generating inventions that get patented in major foreign markets. In 2010 the US patent office granted 3,176 patents to groups containing at least one Chinese resident. Yet 67 percent of those patents were assigned to multinational corporations, not Chinese indigenous firms. (5) No debate, measured by patent applications or journal articles, growth in Chinese scientific output is stupendous. Yet, says Zhignag Shuai, deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Chemical Society and a chemistry professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, “Everybody is busy doing something. However, it has to be borne in mind that at this stage, China can only be regarded as a big country in chemistry, not yet a strong country. Highly original work is still rare. Among the patents and papers, very few can be regarded as groundbreaking, or the best, or the first in their fields.” (6) References

1. Naomi Ching, “Fame is fortune in Sino-science,” Nautilus, Issue 5, September 19, 2013
2. Nai-Xing Wang, “China's chemists should avoid the Vanity Fair,” Nature, 476, 253, 2011
3. Gady Epstein, “Looks good on paper,” The Economist, September 28, 2013
4. Lee Branstetter et al., “The truth about China's patent boom,” Scientific American, September 19, 2013
5. Lee Branstetter et al., “The polyglot patent boom,” Scientific American, October 2013, Page 62
6. Sophie L. Rovner, “China ascendant,” pubs.acs.org, January 11, 2010