Money raining down on pedestrians was not as bizarre, however, as the racket behind it. China is known for its pirated DVDs and fake designer gear, but these criminals were producing something more intellectual: fake scholarly articles which they sold to academics, and counterfeit versions of existing medical journals in which they sold publication slots."
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 $150m, a fivefold increase on just two years earlier."
Chinese scientists are still rewarded for doing good research, and the number of high-quality researchers is increasing. Scientists all round the world also commit fraud. But the Chinese evaluation system is particularly susceptible to it."
Read the rest of the Economist article here.
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Ben Goldacre: Battling Bad Science at the jump.
Ben Goldacre: Battling Bad Science
7 comments:
Evaluating scientific research productivity is a notoriously difficult problem and simply counting the number of papers produced is the worst possible approach. It results in a blizzard of rubbishy science cluttering up the journals and clogging up the limited bandwidth of human brains. It would be better if second and third rank scientists didn't publish at all rather than have them feel obligated to fill hundreds of new journals with their modest discoveries in the pursuit of productivity.
Scientific discovery is an inherently random and chaotic activity. Brilliant ideas strike average minds (PCR and Kary Mullis) and average careers await many brilliant minds.
Fred Sanger won two Nobel prizes and developed the fundamental technology that was the basis for the human genome project. He didn't publish a lot of papers. He is a model of science that is fading under the guise of productivity.
Shocking! and unexpected!
There is certainly nothing wrong with plenty of modest discoveries and their publication - that's where most of the progress comes from. The mistake is the rewards that are attached to the mere act of publishing alone.
Seems to me research and private industry that makes use of it could be be a lot more closely linked. The rewards should result more from market utilization, where people have a vested interest in not promoting crap that only sounds valuable or strokes the current PC fad.
A smart productive scientist who produces quality research should get rich and respected from the market use of his work - not because his name appears in a lot of journals. Under the current system, they get to be like media pundits who are well paid for being known, even if they get it wrong most of the time or add little to the information.
Anyway, to hell with that. The important question is what happened to the 50 grand fluttering out the window?
Bagoh20, I agree that there is nothing wrong with wanting to publish modest discoveries. Some people talk a lot and are prolific publishers, others are quieter and publish less often. The problems come when publication numbers become an end point for evaluation, with predictable results.
Seems to me research and private industry that makes use of it could be be a lot more closely linked.
They are tightly linked. The two local billionaires were both academics at the local university. Only some lines of research lead to commercial applications, although not always the most obvious ones. The richest guy's research area was pure maths.
Under the current system, they get to be like media pundits who are well paid for being known, even if they get it wrong most of the time or add little to the information.
Blowhards attract the most attention in any field.
And the Emmy for the best use of an M60 in a series finale goes to Vince Gilligan.
Wait, so China is producing cheap chinese academics? NO!
This is sciences fault in the fact that it's become this clique-y club that says if you pump out paper after paper, why you must be brilliant, or prolific, or matter in some way. The peer review process has become diluted over time as a political machination rather than remaining an objective tool to weed out crap ideas and crap science. The Chinese are just capitalizing on it. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that all Chinese in the US working in academia should be reviewed again.
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