China’s Nobel Desire

It’s Nobel Prize season, and the inevitable question is appearing on China-related websites.

“China has become the third country to have a man walk in space. But as yet, no Chinese citizen has won a Nobel Prize. This puzzles the Chinese.”

In the Olympics, China gunned for gold, and got it. The government sports training system, and strategy of targeting events where competition was weak, proved effective. This summer China won the largest number of gold medals of any country.

The science community in China would love to score a similar achievement.

And this is creating a new dilemma for some of the most prestigious international scientific journals.

They are being flooded with submissions from China, of uneven quality.

Over the past decade Chinese scientific articles have increased 18 percent per year.

In 2006, 13 percent of articles had at least one Chinese author, up from 3 percent in 1997.

Editor Robin D. Rogers of Crystal Growth & Design says submissions from China now out number those from the U.S.

The surge in submissions is in part a result of academic policies requiring Chinese students to publish in international peer reviewed publications to get a degree. China’s own science journals don’t enjoy the same status, or reputation for rigorous independent evaluation of research. So in essence, China is outsourcing quality control.

It’s common for PhD programs to require students to publish four papers in an international journal to get a diploma, says Sharon Ruwart, who until this summer was Managing Director of Science & Technology in China for the leading science publisher Elsevier.

Editors and reviewers are being inundated with more papers than they can reasonably handle, and some of those papers are not worthy of consideration in the first place.

Sharon tells a story of how a student approached a reviewer at an international conference, and said he couldn’t understand why his paper was rejected: he’d applied a technique that previously had been published in the same journal to a compound no one had looked at before. The editor explained his readers were interested in new techniques and innovations. “”I’ll never forget the look on the young man’s face,” says Sharon. “He really didn’t understand what an international journal editor wants.”

Major international scientific publishers are trying to close the gap.

Elsevier, as well as the American Chemical Society, publisher of 35 journals, have been conducting workshops for scientists on what they expect from submissions, and are also introducing editors of Chinese science journals to how they run their publications.