https://www.ft.com/content/32440f74-780 ... dc8f3fba86
“China is very good at application and refinement,” says Inchcoombe. “But the culture is more one of systematic thinking building on other research, whereas the west tends to applaud individualism. China doesn’t seem to see the need for standout heroes in the same way.”
The physics lecturer in Beijing makes a similar point. “American or British scientists tend to have breakthrough ideas and do truly innovative research,” he says. “Chinese are quick learners. They help to find evidence and make the framework more solid.”
Estimates of the extent of fake scientific output vary enormously, from 2 per cent to 20 per cent or more of published papers. Extrapolating from his own research, Sabel puts paper mills’ global revenues at a minimum of €1bn a year and probably much more. There is general agreement that China is one of the world’s worst offenders, Sabel says, though Cope points out the paper mills are “by no means confined to China”.
Online brokers selling written-to-order papers proliferate on Chinese ecommerce sites such as Taobao. One broker advertising recently on Taobao charged clients $800 for a submission to a middle-tier domestic medical publication.
“Scientific misconduct is an organised practice and has been run as a business almost always half openly,” says a Chinese medical researcher based in the US. She explains that fraudulent papers from low-tier universities, which use cheaper paper mills, are easier to spot. They tend to recycle the same fraudulent data sets multiple times, while academics at more prestigious universities may purchase “leftover” experimental data from other researchers.
There are decades where you fuck around and days where you find out
