Science China to lead US in research by 2013 - UK Royal Society

[Belisarius]

A report published by the BBC today covers a phenomenon studied in depth by the Royal Society in the UK (the Royal Society is a centuries-old organization dedicated to the pursuit of science).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12885271

Briefly, the RS report analyses the number of scientific research papers emanating from the US and from China, as compiled by Elsevier, the leading science publisher, and concludes

China, after displacing the UK as the world's second leading producer of research, could go on to overtake America in as little as two years' time.

"Projections vary, but a simple linear interpretation of Elsevier's publishing data suggests that this could take place as early as 2013," it says.

The complete Royal Society report can be accessed here:

http://royalsociety.org/policy/reports/knowledge-networks-nations/?f=1

Now, the survey is pure quantification, looking only at the number of papers and does not go into the quality of the research, which would be impossible when you are talking about half a million academic articles per year.

And of course it covers published research papers and not secret military or commercial research, which is very important in both countries.

But based on raw numbers it does seem as if China will be the scientific world leader very soon.

The chairman of the report Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn-Smith says:

"I think this is positive, of great benefit, though some might see it as a threat and it does serve as a wake-up call for us not to become complacent."

What do other Orbinauts think about this radical change in world scientific leadership?

 

[SiberianTiger]

I think your SigPic is amusing in this context.

 

[Belisarius]

I'm changing sides as quick as I can to be on the winning team

 

[Wishbone]

Shrug. You can also add to that most of the US papers with author surnames shorter than 4 letters. The real breakthrough would come when Chinese scientists in PRC overcome the language barrier AND the Chinese government invests heavily in some kind of "Manhattan project".

 

[SiberianTiger]

The real breakthrough would come when Chinese scientists in PRC overcome the language barrier

Maybe it's the rest of the world who are on the wrong side of the language barrier...

 

[Belisarius]

All the reports studied in this research were in the English language and analyzed through the Elsevier database.

They talk about the language barrier on p58 of the report:

Although English is the ‘lingua franca’ of research, there still remain significant language
barriers to global research. The Brazilian Academy of Sciences has difficulty in fully evaluating science in Latin America, because a significant amount of research output from the region is produced in Spanish and Portuguese (according to Latindex, there are 13,446 Spanish language journals and 5,297 Portuguese language journals produced in the 30 countries of Latin America), and not captured in global metrics. A similar issue arises with Chinese language journals, and indeed most nonEnglish publications.

As someone who deals with a huge volume of translations between English and Spanish, I can confirm that the language barrier is a serious problem in Spain and Latin America.

Often work is duplicated and/or an English paper is directly plagiarized by Spanish-speakers who hope that nobody will notice. As a translator, this makes it really easy for me: instead of translating, I just copy the original plagiarized paper, check it against the Spanish cheat copy, and it's a perfect translation. If anyone gets caught after I translate, I don't know about that, and I'm afraid I can't reveal details here.

 

[Wishbone]

Ahh... plagiarists... give me a blowtorch, please.

Maybe it's the rest of the world who are on the wrong side of the language barrier...

Yup. This kind of thinking is actually part of the problem. One cannot have scientific development side by side with a superiority complex.

 

[Urwumpe]

I still think that the number of publications has no meaning about the quality of the research. There are pretty crucial differences in the scientific cultures around the world, especially about when to publish something. In the USA for example, every nonsense that crossed the brain of a scientist is published. It doesn't even matter if the experiment had any results that had a meaning, or the theory is experimentally verifiable, publish soon, publish often, or become forgotten. Much to the annoyance of German politicians, who would also like to see their R&D funding turn into large publication numbers. But that isn't the case here, here publications are done less quickly, also the order of the research is pretty different. In Germany, you usually do research with set goals, and if this goal was not reached, you publish the study as failure, or even start a new study with new goals (which is more likely). In the USA, it is more common to do an experiment and later guess what it means.

So, in the same process in which a German team publishes one study about a physical experiment or engineering project, a US team does already about 5. One for the actual experiment and 4 completely disagreeing interpretations what the experiment results mean.

Which is then why the number of publications does not automatically result in higher circulation of the publication (more references by other research) or more international Prizes.

So, I see China in terms of publications not as a threat, but rather as an amusing phenomena. Chinese students are hardly known as creative, and the party does not really encourage creativity. A large number of the publications is also not really interesting outside China, this part is mostly about communist theories. A lot of this was already researched 100 years ago in the west, but is still published again and again as the next new step in communism to give party members cheap academic titles.