Christopher VanLang
It’s sort of true but there should be some clarifications.

If I find a paper written by Chinese Scientists trained at Chinese Universities published in Chinese journals, chances are it will go immediately into the trash. If I find a paper with 2/3 of the criteria, I will likely throw it into the trash.

The data that I like to show frequently are these stats on the # of Chinese publications. The volume of publications is immense. However, at one can tell by the citations per document and the H-Index, that the quality of these publications are poor.

Why? Most of these publications just aren’t very good. The experiments aren’t designed well, the results are questionable. Why is there some much emphasis on quantity and not quality?

I don’t think this has anything to do with race. I think it has everything to with government and priorities. Their schools crank out millions of scientists and engineers and they do their jobs well. But can they carry out things to the next level? What if they need to work outside the subjects of their training? Does their training prepare them to be flexible? Are they publishing because the government incentivizes them to do so or because they are actually generating good quality science? Turns out that professors get paid based on the number of publications they push out.

From the PNAS study looking at the 2,047 retractions from Pubmed, the US is the leader in retractions due to Fraud (43% of the reasons of retraction) but China is the leader for Plagiarism and Duplicate Publication (24% of the reasons of retraction). Also note that India appears in that grouping.

These are things that I’m forced to ask when I look at candidates and manuscripts. Politicians may talk about how the West is being overrun by Chinese trained scientists, but I don’t really think anyone in States or the EU is really concerned.

Many of the scientific leaders in China remain US and EU trained. Many of them are indeed intelligent, hard-working, and yes, Chinese. There is not question that Chinese Americans play a huge role in driving the scientific innovation in the US. Many of those scientists are coveted around the world. The Chinese government and Universities have been making very high offers to draw out Western trained academics and so far have brought in over 4000 scientists. Other initiatives include a 6.8 billion dollar boost to the Chineses Academy of Science.

However, the rest of them? Their value is questionable.

via Quora