2005年7月15日回答Nature杂志记者的提问

武夷山

    这是当时我对Nature杂志5个问题的回答，保留了原貌，即使现在发现某处表达不佳也不改了。

    记者最后在发表于Nature的报道中只引用了我一句话，即物质奖励措施对于发表更多论文确实起到了有效的促进作用。而我前一句说，奖励论文发表的行为是荒唐可笑的，记者却不加引用。这就有点断章取义了，好像我支持论文奖励措施似的。

    天下乌鸦一般黑，看来全世界的很多记者都善于断章取义啊。

It's an honor to be involved with Nature in any way. As a scientometrician, I have been a close observer to the phenomenon you mentioned for many years. My personal comments are as follows:

1. In fact, USA number did not decline continuously, but fluctuate, some years going up, some years down. EU/Asian numbers did rise more conspicuously. Possible reasons are: in USA, research and publication are basically an autonomous process. The federal government never encouraged publication (it's not its businesses). But in Asia/Europe, we have a very strong awareness about the pressure to catch up with USA in S & T. So some countries, e.g. Korea, identified certain SCI paper number as a goal to be achieved in a future year in its government  S & T plan. Some other countries, such as Spain, have clear-cut measures to reward productive professors. On the other hand, USA has always been number one in SCI number. The base line is too large to see any sensible increase.

2. Almost all Asian countries have long-term plan for S & T development, including China, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.  At least from near-term perspective, plans are effective in accelerating the development of S & T, which results in more publications. Another reason is that Asian parents all give more emphasis upon hard sciences, such as math, physics, chemistry, computer, etc, while in USA the favorable fields are more profitable ones such as law, business administration, medicine, finance and so on. 

3. I don’t see anything done to address the problem , if it is regarded as a problem at all. USA attracts many talents from all over the world, so it does not need to worry about its status in S & T for now.

4. The quality of USA papers is generally higher than other places, but the highest quality belongs to smaller countries such as Switzerland. The biggest advantage for USA lies not in publication productivity or quality of papers, but in commercialization of research results.

5. In Asia, China, Korea, India, Japan, and Singapore are all doing well. In China, my institute, ISTIC, holds a press release once a year, where we give different publication ranks and citation ranks for countries, provinces, disciplines, universities, research institutes, hospitals, etc. This event is reported in all the major media (CCTV, Central People’s Radio, many national newspapers, and so on). University presidents attach great importance to the position of his or her university in such ranks. SCI rank is treated more seriously, since it reflects international visibility. So a kind of competition emerges among universities or research institutes. Some institutions even reward authors who published in SCI journals, especially authors who published in high impact factor journals. Sometimes I feel it a ridiculous behavior, because publication is integral part of the whole research process, money reward seems unnecessary. However, the truth is that such incentives are effective to promote more publications. In order to publish in international journals, some Japanese authors even pay considerable money to ask English proficient people to brush up, improve or rewrite their manuscripts. All these big and small actions lead to faster growth of paper amount in Asian countries.

Wu Yishan

Chief Engineer

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC)