中國在面對美國的大國競爭之下，訂定下一個五年計劃要全力發展自己的基礎科學研發能力！
中國決定投入更多的研發資金到科學研究當中，2021年將增加更多資金投入基礎研究當中！
而Nature 專文評論這件事，卻指出了中國論文造假工廠可能是最大的問題 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00638-3According to the five-year plan, China intends to increase spending on research and development (R&D) by more than 7% annually.
Li said that central-government spending on basic research would also increase, by 10.6% in 2021, which Cong says is higher than the average annual increase over the past five years. And the plan proposes raising the overall share of basic research in R&D spending from 6% to more than 8%. Although that increase is welcome, it would still be only half the proportion of R&D spending of many countries, says Cong. The United States, for example, currently spends about 17% of R&D funding on basic research.
More details on China’s science funding are scheduled to emerge later this year.
The pressure to meet societal goals and the competitive system for disseminating funding could also result in researchers cheating the system in new ways. “The tolerance for failure is going to be low,” says Zhang. And with fewer scientific publications as a result of the shift to industry, Chinese scientists’ work will become less visible to the world, she says. “They are pushing elite scientists into a dark room behind closed doors.”
Nature專家指出中國論文工廠造假論文嚴重，Nature發現中國製造的造假論文光2020年，一年被撤回三百七十篇，而其中一千多篇有學術上的疑雲.....而撤回論文其中的197篇是來自於中國的醫院。
(https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5)
Publishers almost never explicitly declare on retraction notices that a particular study is fraudulent or was created by a company to order, because it is difficult to prove. None of the RSC’s retraction notices, for instance, mentions a paper mill — despite the RSC’s announcement that it thinks the articles did come from one. But Nature has tallied 370 articles retracted since January 2020, all from authors at Chinese hospitals, that either publishers or independent sleuths have alleged to come from paper mills (see ‘Fraud allegations’). Most were published in the past three years (see ‘Chinese hospital papers on the rise’). Publishers have added expressions of concern to another 45 such articles.
Nature has identified a further 197 retractions of papers from authors at Chinese hospitals since the start of last year. These are not ones that have made it onto lists of potential publication-mill products, although some were flagged by sleuths for image concerns, often on the post-publication peer-review website PubPeer.
中國醫院為何大量製造假論文成為論文工廠的最大客戶呢？
因為中國的大醫院規定要成為主任級醫師必須有論文發表，而這些醫師大多忙於臨床沒有時間做研究，但是為了在醫院順利升等升官就要生出論文。於是此時論文工廠就是他們的救命繩索。
而中國醫院因此大量發表許多論文，而其中的部分論文則使用的是造假的資料.....
Nature期刊則發專文檢討這些亂象，並認為中國需要檢討如何讓提昇論文的可靠性
Five ways China must cultivate research integrity (中國必須培養研究誠信的五種方式)
Publishers and others battling paper mills suspect they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg in the published literature. In part, that’s because similarities between images across studies might become obvious only when many papers are compared. Sleuths also know that features such as similar western blots and flawed nucleotide sequences might be the most obvious signs of paper-mill activity, says Bik. “There may be tonnes of other paper mills that have done a better job of hiding it,” she says. Editors at the COPE forum said they’d seen paper mills in areas such as computer sciences, engineering, humanities and social sciences, for instance.
The overall size of the paper-mill problem probably runs to thousands or tens of thousands of papers, Bik, Byrne and others think. Graf, at Wiley, says it’s hard to estimate. “I don’t think it should be understated, I can’t say how big it is,” he says. “We have very little information about the people or companies doing this. I am exasperated by the situation, and that is being polite.”
當然過去中國政府已經做了許多打擊假論文的法規！不過Nature仍然擔心未來在中國拿出更多經費投入科學研發的同時，會有更多論文工廠提供的假研究論文會更嚴重。
