Representative picture.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
What is it? China has surpassed the U.S. as the greatest contributor to nature and science journals, The Guardianstudies. Author affiliations to Chinese establishments have additionally elevated in most scientific branches, together with the bodily sciences, chemistry, environmental and earth sciences, relative to their U.S. counterparts. A report by the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy of Japan additionally mentioned that in 2018-2020, China revealed at the very least 407,181 papers in a 12 months as in contrast to 293,434 from the U.S. It additionally mentioned that China-based research accounted for a bigger share of the prime 1% of the most frequently-cited research than American research.
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What is the context?
- China’s President, Xi Jinping, has promised to push extra funding into research as academia more and more turns into “a frontier for technological competition.”
- Mr. Jinping’s purpose is to make China a world chief in scientific research.
- Mention of Chinese papers additionally elevated due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. References to genome-sequence information of the virus additionally led to greater citations.
- China overtaking the US in its contribution to scientific journals reveals the altering dynamics between the two nations and China’s rising dominance in the world order.
- The report additionally cited allegations of low-quality or fraudulent research being revealed.
- The well-known science integrity marketing consultant and scientific-fraud sleuth Elisabeth Bik has reportedly found “hundreds of cases of unsubstantiated research coming from China.”
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Why does it matter?
- Despite being the greatest bilateral collaborators, scientists from China and the U.S. have discovered it very arduous to collaborate ever since relations between the two nations soured.
- At least 100 scientists misplaced their jobs after the ‘China initiative’ of the U.S. Justice Department determined to “root out” Chinese spies, the report mentioned.
- Even although China has ranked greater than the US in phrases of churning out the quantity of research, scientists in China say that they’re pushed to “prioritise quantity over quality”.
- To curb this, in 2020, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology banned universities and establishments from granting monetary incentives to publish extra research.
- India, on the different hand, has ranked third globally in phrases of the quantity of research produced, in accordance to a 2019 report by the National Science Foundation.
- However, there was no important progress in the high quality of research which is usually measured by the variety of citations inside different research papers, the report mentioned.
- India has additionally seen an increase in fraudulent research papers in latest occasions with a number of research being recalled or being put beneath assessment for alleged information manipulation, plagiarism and the follow of predatory publication.
