China tops U.S. in quantity and quality of scientific papers

I think the claims in this article are dubious.<p>For example: &quot;Research papers are considered higher quality the more they are cited by others.&quot;<p>This may be true in general, but what if there was a &quot;hack the system&quot; effort whereby academics colluded to promote each others&#x27; research... say... in a highly corrupt country.<p>There has been a long term battle against corruption at universities in China.<p>For example, a quick search for: china university research corruption<p>yields several articles. If I had more time today, I&#x27;d search for one in particular which compares retracted articles due to discovery of corruption in research, in China, compared to other countries. China&#x27;s rate was astounding.

&gt; Research papers are considered higher quality the more they are cited by others.<p>At one point, links directed to a webpage were considered a metric of quality too, and then we realized that this could be gamed or at least be misleading in some circumstances.<p>I&#x27;m not a member of academia who is embedded deep in the world of research papers every day, but I wouldn&#x27;t fully trust any metric like this about China without a real deep dive into the numbers and seeing who is doing the citing. Maybe the article goes into it more, but I&#x27;m not a subscriber and cannot see.

I skim a lot of research papers that pop up in articles here on HN and in other places, and one thing I notice is that papers coming out of the US American universities are overwhelmingly produced by foreign students and researchers originally from India, China, and Europe.

China has a lot of brilliant scientists. They also have 1.4 billion people. Not surprising.

And yet Alexa still can&#x27;t understand the most basic things.<p>And yet AI can&#x27;t drive auto&#x27;s.<p>And yet we still don&#x27;t have fundamental understanding of fusion power.<p>And yet we still don&#x27;t have full understanding of protein folding or how DNA winds itself up so tightly.<p>And so many other things that have been issues since forever ago.<p>The world hasn&#x27;t had any real significant scientific breakthroughs that change our lives in decades other than incremental improvements on existing technology.<p>Scientists can pat each other on the back all they want for their awesome papers...wake me up when a scientist finally does something that impacts my life.