As a non-Chinese scientist, I can attest that there is intense pressure to publish as many papers as possible pretty much everywhere, and this leads to a problem of bad research across the world.
China may be among the worst offenders in this respect, but the particular thing the OP is asking about doesn't strike me as a Chinese-specific thing at all. I see non-Chinese scientists rushing half-baked results to arXiv all the time.
https://qz.com/978037/china-publishes-more-science-research-...
I respectfully submit that you may be providing an anecdotal experience.
It’s so bad that China’s courts have called for the death penalty for scientific fraud.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/23/china-death-penalty-rese...
Goodness me.
To add some context, the death penalty is used much more widely in China than a Westerner might realize, so to them this idea is not quite as radical as it might seem. The PRC government is a bit tight lipped about exact policies, but it's known the death penalty gets employed for things like corruption and even major economic crimes like fraud or money counterfeiting. And of course drug offenses and the violent crimes.
Replication is just a nice term for it. It can just as well be a crisis of fraud with the failure of replicating fraudulent results as the consequence.
Scientific fraud and garbage results is a huge problem Everywhere. It's actually big enough to nearly invalidate the entire field of psychology.
If China has half the worlds academics-writing-papers, one would _expect_ them to be responsible for half the fabricated ones.
To be fair, according to TFA the death penalty is only for clinical trials where the drug or procedure, due to faked or doctored data, causes severe or fatal consequences.
It actually seems pretty reasonable to me. You develop a drug that actually kills people but fake your data to show it saves lives. Then you make money while people start dying, essentially killing people because your career was more important than reality. I’d call that murder.
There is deluge of terrible papers from China that are just a mess, below any imaginable standard. Ones that labs in the EU/US/Russia/Japan/etc. don't put out. Yes, everyone has to publish, and there are bad papers out there, but the volume and low quality from China is unmatched.
Let's agree this is anecdotal at best, and move on. Facts need data to back them up. There's no data or links to research in this post.
See, for instance, Stigler's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy (for the concept an example itself)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27...
> There are no prizes for being second in science.
The reply (second quote above) fits in context, but there is more to it.
1. Publishing early at the expense of quality has a way of catching up to one's reputation. (Hopefully.)
2. History has many examples of scientists who were "too early" or not "in the right place at the right time" to get recognition.
3. A result may get little attention in one field but a lot in another. One example that comes to mind are string-matching algorithms. Sometimes they seem a dime-a-dozen in CS. But the "right" ones have transformed DNA sequencing.
and
https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685294623449874432
The papers were totally rushed.
