Links

Two links [hat tip to M. Madhan]:

• Ben Guarino, Emily Rauhala and William Wan in The Washington Post: Health & Science China increasingly challenges American dominance of science

  The United States spends half a trillion dollars a year on scientific research — more than any other nation on Earth — but China has pulled into second place, with the European Union third and Japan a distant fourth.

  China is on track to surpass the United States by the end of this year, according to the National Science Board. In 2016, annual scientific publications from China outnumbered those from the United States for the first time.

  “There seems to be a sea change in how people are talking about Chinese science,” said Alanna Krolikowski, a Chinese science expert at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Foreign observers, many of whom were once condescending, now “are rather in awe at what the Chinese policies have accomplished.”

• Dalmeet Singh Chawla in Nature Index: Italian scientists increase self-citations in response to promotion policy:

  Italian scientists have been citing themselves more often since a controversial law came into effect in 2010 demanding academics meet productivity thresholds to gain promotion. Economic and managerial engineering showed the greatest leap in self-citations from 2010 to 2014 of the four fields examined.

HHMI International Awards

Howard Hughes Medical Institute has announced the winners of its International Early Career Awards, meant for (non-US) researchers who "trained in the United States as a graduate student or a postdoctoral fellow and have published important research." And each awardee will "receive $650,000: $100,000 a year for five years plus $150,000 the first year for major equipment purchases and other investments."

HHMI's elite list features one Indian scientist: Sandhya Koushika of the National Centre for Biological Sciences [link via Subhra Priyadarshini].

* * *

This is the first time for these awards. Also, the awards are meant for a special group of people (who have done their doctoral or post-doctoral research in the US). The country-wise break-up of the applicant pool is not known. And, finally, the numbers are small -- we are in the anecdote territory, not the statistical one.

All these factors make it difficult for us to say anything meaningful about the country-wise break-up of the HHMI awardees.

But some comparisons become inevitable: one that stares at us (because our leaders -- including Prime Minister -- seem obsessed about it) is this: China leads the list with seven IECS awards, while India has just one.

The countries with the most IECS awardees are China (7), Portugal (5), and Spain (5), but recipients are also based in nine other countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, India, Italy, Poland, South Africa, and South Korea. Nine of the 28 (32 percent) are women.

One Chinese University Leader's Crusade against Misconduct in Science

Here's an excerpt from David Cyranoski's article in Nature:

[In his second big case, in mid-2010, the] editor-in-chief of a journal published by Springer contacted Yang to say that plagiarism and fabrication in an article from a ZJU researcher were so egregious that Springer was considering blocking all submissions from the university to its 2,000 science, technology and medicine journals. (Yang declines to name the researcher or editor.) “It put pressure on. We had to convince them that we could handle the case,” says Yang.

This time, Yang was ready. He dismissed the main scientist involved, and cut the salary and PhD-student allocation of the corresponding author. “Springer was satisfied,” says Yang.

Over the past two years, Yang says, he has dealt just as briskly with another 40 or so misconduct cases at the ZJU. More than 20 researchers have been found guilty of wrongdoing after discussion by the university administration. For the ten cases involving recent graduates, more than half lost their degrees. One sued the ZJU to overturn the ruling of plagiarism. She lost. If work done during your training is fraudulent, “your degree should be taken away”, says Yang firmly.

In cases involving faculty members, three had their employment terminated, four faced disciplinary action including a pay cut, and the rest were issued with public or internal warnings. Some have been temporarily forbidden from taking on PhD students.

A Chinese Chemist Issues a Wake-up Call

The country's administrators tend to judge the quality of scientific research solely by journal impact factors, Wang says. Articles published in journals with a high impact factor are considered excellent. Research proposals — and the referees who evaluate them — are judged based on the impact factor of previous publications, and salaries are calculated using information on the impact factor of published work.

This is a "very crude approach" to evaluating scientific research, says Wang. One problem is that impact factors measure how frequently the average paper is cited in a particular period, so the more popular the research area the easier it is to achieve a high impact factor.

"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," he writes.

That's from this SciDev.Net summary of the letter in Nature by Nai-Xing Wang, professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. [free registration required for the second link].

Is Scientific Misconduct Rampant in China?

NYTimes and The Economist have now joined a long line of news outlets shining a harsh spotlight on too many Chinese academics and researchers straying from the straight path. That some of these outlets are Chinese gives us the impression that this is a real problem, and not something cooked up by shrill westerners who are too jealous / scared of China's ascent in science.

Here's a partial list of stuff that I have seen in the past year or so:

1. October 2010: NYTimes: Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent.

2. October 2010: The Economist: Scientists behaving badly; Recent events show China needs to clean up its scientific act.

3. June 2010: China Daily: Academic corruption undermining higher education: Yau Shing-tung.

4. April 2010: University World News: CHINA: Universities fail to tackle plagiarism.

5. April 2010: Boston Globe: In China, academic cheating is rampant; Some say practice harmful to nation.

6. March 2010: University World News: CHINA: Professor sacked for academic plagiarism

7. July 2009: China View: Nearly half of China's science workers think academic cheating is "common".

News Analysis of the Day

Onion does it again: Report: China To Overtake U.S. As World's Biggest Asshole By 2020 [link via James Fallows]:

WASHINGTON—According to a new report released Monday by a panel of top economists and social scientists, the People's Republic of China will overtake the United States as the world's dominant asshole by the year 2020.

The findings, published in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, support recent speculation that America's unquestioned reign as the leading super-prick may soon be drawing to a close, leaving China as the foremost shithead among all developed nations.

"We are seeing a changing of the asshole guard," said Andrew Freireich, noted economist and lead author of the article. "Although the U.S. will remain among the world's two or three biggest cocks through much of this century, we can now confidently project that China, with its soaring economic growth, ever-expanding cultural influence, and total disregard for basic human rights, will overtake America as King Prick Numero Uno within the next 10 years."

Added Freireich, "It's the dawning of a new huge bastard era."

China's growing stature in science

A bunch of links -- which have links to other pieces of interest.

1. Evan Osnos in New Yorker: Science Superpowers. This follow-up post strikes a sobering note.

2. An online panel discussion in NYTimes on Will China Achieve Science Supremacy?

3. Clive Cookson in The Financial Times: China scientists lead world in research growth. [Check out the graph accompanying this story: China's publications grew by more than 12 times between 1990 and 2008, while India's grew by just three times.]

4. And finally, an example of China's Big Think: hiring Big Guns.

Annals of Absurdity: China's new regulations on reincarnation

In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation."

Do read the story for a better understanding of the underlying motives for China's regulatory overreach.

Thanks to Dhimanth for the pointer.

Higher ed revolution in China

Two links about how China is sprucing up its higher education sector. First, check out this story in the Christian Science Monitor [link via Mark Trodden over at Cosmic Variance, an excellent group blog of a bunch of physicists]. The second link is to this NBER report titled Does Globalization of the Scientific/Engineering Workforce Threaten U.S. Economic Leadership? [link via Slashdot].

Well, the China story is absolutely fascinating; it is so fascinating, in fact, that it does not need any spicy comparisons with the US story or the India story. However, you find most of the news items in the media flogging this us-vs-them theme when it comes to reporting about Chinese progress in any field. So, the CSM story on Chinese revolution in higher education represents a refreshing break from the norm!