I used to be in academia, you don't have to sell me on the state of academia.
That said, I don't think you're reading the chart quite correctly. Lots of papers get retracted, but of institutions, 5% from this one get retracted. All western colleges probably have more by pure numbers, but this is akin to the per capita problem.
I used to be in academia, you don't have to sell me on the state of academia.
Cheers, so we know how it works. :(
That said, I don't think you're reading the chart quite correctly.
Chart is biased.
My point is that western institutilons have official retraction rate lower than 5%, only because of political/finacial reasons, not because of better papers quality. My second point is that this official retraction rate is a huge underestimation of what have to be retracted in normal system.
Again, not quite correct, because Chinese have been caught in "paper mills"
They also have "electronics mills", "kitchenware mills", even "car mills". That's what they good in. Of course they will have "paper mills". And if they see that only number of publications and citations valued, they will go for it, not for quality. Expecially taking in account that western scientists do exactly the same for decades.
Quality of Soviet scientific publications was order of magnitude higher, until western "rules" arrived on USSR fall. And now we have same stream of useless, never reproduced papers and so publications/citations race for the sole goal of higher number of publications and citations.
I think around 80% of modern scientific papers should be retracted, regardless of country of origin.
I always wondered why even papers that was not confirmed by later experiments never retracted or at least disclaimered that they was found false. F.e. in particle physics. all that papers with new particle predictions that was never confirmed even on LHC, despite all conditions described in paper was met, are still there, like nothing happened and still cited and their authors accounted as valued ones.
Also, this passage from the article:
That proportion is an order of magnitude higher than China’s retraction rate, and 50 times the global average.
does not mean that there are 50 times more fraudlent chineese papers. It means that chineese papers retracted 50 times more often. That could easily mean that same western fraudlent articles just not retracted for political/financial/whatever reasons.
Also, biology and medicine is a very corrupted area. If Chineese publish articles that could potentially harm western BigPharma, then they will be retractded by western journals, because they depend highly on western BigPharma.
Retraction also does not mean that article is inherently fraudlent. It could be just counter-narrative f.e.
Recall that ivermectin papers. Once it become a threat to BigPharma, it nearly disappeared from publications, and many articles was retracted, despite being valid and even replicated.
Well, I was admittedly unaware of the Soviet problem. But there is an issue you're missing, if a paper mill shits out a ton of papers, more papers means more retractions. Further, they will invariably be of lower quality and given the Chinese propensity to lie, more papers means more fraudulent ones.
I used to be in academia, you don't have to sell me on the state of academia.
That said, I don't think you're reading the chart quite correctly. Lots of papers get retracted, but of institutions, 5% from this one get retracted. All western colleges probably have more by pure numbers, but this is akin to the per capita problem.
Cheers, so we know how it works. :(
Chart is biased.
My point is that western institutilons have official retraction rate lower than 5%, only because of political/finacial reasons, not because of better papers quality. My second point is that this official retraction rate is a huge underestimation of what have to be retracted in normal system.
Again, not quite correct, because Chinese have been caught in "paper mills"
Here's the story from the chart, which makes this clear: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00455-y
They also have "electronics mills", "kitchenware mills", even "car mills". That's what they good in. Of course they will have "paper mills". And if they see that only number of publications and citations valued, they will go for it, not for quality. Expecially taking in account that western scientists do exactly the same for decades.
Quality of Soviet scientific publications was order of magnitude higher, until western "rules" arrived on USSR fall. And now we have same stream of useless, never reproduced papers and so publications/citations race for the sole goal of higher number of publications and citations.
I think around 80% of modern scientific papers should be retracted, regardless of country of origin.
I always wondered why even papers that was not confirmed by later experiments never retracted or at least disclaimered that they was found false. F.e. in particle physics. all that papers with new particle predictions that was never confirmed even on LHC, despite all conditions described in paper was met, are still there, like nothing happened and still cited and their authors accounted as valued ones.
Also, this passage from the article:
does not mean that there are 50 times more fraudlent chineese papers. It means that chineese papers retracted 50 times more often. That could easily mean that same western fraudlent articles just not retracted for political/financial/whatever reasons.
Also, biology and medicine is a very corrupted area. If Chineese publish articles that could potentially harm western BigPharma, then they will be retractded by western journals, because they depend highly on western BigPharma.
Retraction also does not mean that article is inherently fraudlent. It could be just counter-narrative f.e.
Recall that ivermectin papers. Once it become a threat to BigPharma, it nearly disappeared from publications, and many articles was retracted, despite being valid and even replicated.
Well, I was admittedly unaware of the Soviet problem. But there is an issue you're missing, if a paper mill shits out a ton of papers, more papers means more retractions. Further, they will invariably be of lower quality and given the Chinese propensity to lie, more papers means more fraudulent ones.