there’s six different related articles about the same thing on that website, and the metric of declaring them “science cities” seems to be the amount of buildings they have built in the cities, rather than verified scientific advancement.
global science trends over the past decade. China’s research output in the journals tracked by the Nature Index continues to grow strongly, demonstrated by Beijing extending its lead at the summit of the science cities ranking to almost double the Share of the second-placed city. The fact that this second place is now taken by Shanghai, pushing New York into third
So they claim to track actual output themselves, but it’s still a very big question whether that is accurate?
I have heard that Chinese research is riddled with fake research papers estimated at about half of it being copied from works of others.
The same is allegedly true for getting into higher education in China, the competition is so steep that people cheat to get in.yep, I did a deep dive into the scientific paper mill industry and you are exactly correct.
the only other metric I have heard about(besides just buildings being built) for scientific advancement within China comes from the sheer volume of papers they submit which have been studied again and again and at least 20% are entirely fabricated, but the number is probably much higher and the academics don’t have time to weed out all the irrelevant ones so they just let the irrelevant ones go through, but there’s a dearth of innovative progressive science coming out of China as far as anyone can still tell.
they straight up have paper mills and it’s openly known that those papers are one either based on completely fabricated data, or two based on irrelevant already known data.
as far as editors trying to check all of these false papers out of China have reported, it’s sort of like if you were submitting an article to an automotive mechanics magazine, and you just did a book report on what a piston is.
like yeah, that’s what a piston is, but no knowledge is being gained from a report on an already known technology and its known applications.
so how do those papers get into the magazines?
very often those paper mills offer a grant to a legitimate scientist who needs to get a project done and they’ll agree to be credited as a co-author on these ersatz Chinese papers so that they’re more widely accepted.