Bengaluru: An upsurge in recent media coverage of China’s ascent in research and academia has brought large attention to Chinese investment in different fields of science. As the country advances in domestic work, the influx of Chinese researchers into academia has had many Western scientists take notice.
China has been flexing its scientific muscles in recent years to beat the United States with the most number of cited papers in the world as well as the largest contributor to natural science research by 2022.
But, according to some, this could be because of home bias and citation loop. Findings seem to indicate that Chinese researchers have a tendency to cite papers published within the country more than those published in English academic journals.
At least two new papers, from the US and Japan, concluded that Chinese academia is rife with a “home bias” problem. The findings have raised “concerns” that it could skew global research rankings.
But not all academics are not convinced there is a problem.
“China is emerging as a scientific powerhouse. But there are worries that seem to emerge from the West’s more traditional powerhouses in North America and Europe,” neuroscientist Vidita Vaidya told ThePrint. “It is a little hypocritical to compare China now to Europe and North America today instead of what they were 20-30 years ago.”
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China’s ascent in academia
In recent years, China has invested heavily in science and technology, including research. Over the past few years, the Chinese government’s budget for science and basic research has increased consistently by 2-10 percent each year.
In 2024, China will spend a total of $52 billion (Rs 4,37,177.949 crore) on science and technology—a 10 percent increase from 2023, and has released detailed plans for scientific development until 2050, with special focus on space exploration.
The large investment in academia will naturally see an output that results in a large number of papers being published from China, researchers asserted.
“This is just a different way of saying that China has invested a great deal in cutting-edge technology,” immunologist Satyajit Rath explained to ThePrint.
“Researchers from India, South Africa and other such countries have been forever pointing out that their work does not get cited enough by the Global North,” he added.
Citations are also impacted by how “reputed” a journal is, and papers which are published in top journals like Nature and Cell, among others, tend to be cited more, researchers explained.
This is complicated by the fact that academic publication as an industry is plagued by extreme expenditure to publish a paper. These journals, that are considered impactful in global academia, are all based in North America and Europe.
“There should be equal openness in applying the same lens to one’s own hegemony. The West has taken a dominant approach in academia and science, and there is equal room for self-analysis,” Vaidya said.
Citation bias also varies across fields, astrophysicist Abhijeet Borkar explained to ThePrint. “I have not come across a home bias phenomenon from China in my field, but this phenomenon might be more true in subfields like material sciences where there is enough capital invested, and large enough communities that local citations would dominate.”
There also exists language bias—papers published in non-English languages often tend to quote sources in their own language.
This is not to say that there are no problems with academia in China. Citation stacking, the process of citing within a group with the specific objective of increasing the number of citations and, consequently, the “reputation” of the paper, could very well be present. In other words, citation stacking is a practice in which groups of journals exchange citations at excessively high rates.
Additionally, just like elsewhere, China also has a predatory publication problem where people can pay to publish non-legitimate results, Borkar noted.
However, citation bias in China, and in places like India and others in the Global South, is not comparable to academia in the Global North today, researchers pointed out.
“Thirty years ago, China was dealing with a whole bunch of other primary issues of their own. Comparisons by countries have a tendency to juxtapose themselves as scientific superpowers, and there is a narrative structure underlying this, which worries me a little,” Vaidya said. “I would like to look at the data from a broader lens. A better comparison would be today’s China to the West 30 years ago.”
What the deal with citations is
Everything said, there is a larger problem underlying all this comparison in academia—the use of citations as a measure of success.
One of the primary parameters which is considered to judge how influential a paper has been is the number of times it has been cited, or, in other words, the number of times other papers have used the findings as assumed facts and built on them.
However, this has long been considered a problematic metric. Analyses of the 100 most cited academic papers of all time show that all of them are papers on methodology, outlining various scientific techniques to be used in the lab, and not landmark findings in various fields.
At the end of the day, Rath pointed out, citations still translate into funding, career advancement, and deciding what kind of research will progress. “What we do not do enough of is public transparency. Academia is funded by the public, and there should be more than just domain experts whose opinions count when it comes to policy, funding and career advancement processes.” Other researchers concurred.
“Metrics like these generate a toxic culture of competition in the sciences, which incentivises behaviours like stacking and fraudulent research,” palaeontologist Advait Jukar explained to ThePrint.
Vaidya drew attention to the larger picture that requires understanding.
“Power bases between countries that are jostling for supremacy is a problematic idea but it exists and it is unsurprising that it would play out in academia. In all likelihood, it is being played by China in their goal to establish a space for themselves too, but I would like to see a much richer and nuanced discussion of academic hegemony and the emergence of academic superpowers from the Global South,” she said.
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)