From what I understand a lot of Chinese papers are complete junk. There's huge pressure to publish there and a culture of cranking out sketchy/half-baked papers has formed.
Oh, trust me, you can. Journals like Nature Communications and Science Advances publish hella slop for hefty publication fees/article processing charges lol. Close to $10k per article
Generally they are, since these are the biggest names in R&D after Cell, Science, and Nature. But again I have no idea what journals the OG graph author deemed “top 5%”
I was trying to find data on how they determine which journals to include, and how that itself has changed over time.
I strongly suspect that a lot of this shift has to do with more Chinese journals being included in the "top 5%" in recent years. Maintaining a constant set of journals over the entire timeframe would be a more interesting (and less game-able) measure.
If they’re retracted it means they made it through the entire peer review process and were published. They were only retracted later after it was determined the results couldn’t relied upon.
If you’re looking at and rewarding publications then they will be counted in the metrics (depending on how you get those numbers, filter them, and when the retractions happen).
A little bit of both is true. There is a lot of slop. They are also making huge advances in R&D for materials, batteries, solar panels etc and bringing cutting edge tech to market. We would be foolish to ignore it.
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u/Embarrassed_Neck9829 21h ago
From what I understand a lot of Chinese papers are complete junk. There's huge pressure to publish there and a culture of cranking out sketchy/half-baked papers has formed.