Putting China’s science surge in proper perspective

The Economist has a good story on the rise of Chinese science. In terms of “high-impact” (i.e. highly cited) publications, China has soared past the US and Europe:

Now, these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt. Measuring the impact of papers by looking at how many other papers cite them can be a biased measure of true impact — you can have a bunch of researchers who all cite each other copiously and thus inflate the metric.

Qiu, Steinwender, and Azoulay have a recent paper in which they argue that this phenomenon is especially common in China:

The researchers basically just identify “home bias” by controlling for a country’s size. Their measure of home bias still displays some apparent size dependence, with small European countries at the bottom end of the scale and large countries at the top end. So I do wonder if they controlled for size correctly. But China still definitely sticks out above all others, including India:

So while I think the authors’ conclusion that the UK is still ahead of China in high-impact science seems pretty suspect, there really does seem to be something going on here in terms of Chinese researchers citing each other an awful lot.

You can interpret this in a couple of different ways. One possibility is that Chinese science is just much more high-quality than people outside China realize and non-Chinese speakers fail to cite these high-quality Chinese papers due to the language barrier.

An alternative interpretation — which Qiu et al. suggest — is that China’s government told the country’s researchers to go out and write papers that get a ton of citations, and the researchers basically responded by establishing implicit or explicit citation rings. And, of course, it could be some