接受美国科学文化杂志Nautilus（鹦鹉螺）采访（2013年）

武夷山

    2013年7月间，美国科学文化杂志Nautilus（鹦鹉螺）就中国科研评价问题采访了我。下面是记者整理的采访稿。最后他们到底发表了什么样的报道，引用了我的哪些话，我已记不清了（或者他们压根没有告诉我发表信息）。

Wu Yishan, deputy director of the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, believes that some performance evaluation indicators are necessary, both for personal career development of a researcher, and for the whole nation.

The institute is a national institute designed to provide decision-making support to government departments, industry, universities, research institutes and research personnel on sci-tech related activities.

“Leo Tolstoy’s book Anna Karenina begins with this sentence: 

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

“I would like to borrow the so-called Anna Karenina principle on evaluating scientific researchers, that every successful scientist has to accomplish some similar prerequisites,” Wu said.

Wu, who spent three decades studying sci-tech information, said that according to German scholars Lutz Bornmann and Wiener Marx, there are three prerequisites: a researcher’s competence in publishing papers and obtaining grants, the citation of the paper, and peer-reviewed real scientific discoveries.

“To meet the three prerequisites, one is faced increasing difficulty,” Wu said, added that journal space and grants, which are both scarce resources, prove a researcher’s advantage over other competitors; the citation of a paper means you are accepted by the citing scientists ; and the last and the most difficult one, making some “real scientific discovery”, needs recognition of your peers.

“In China, we always use “science and technology” together, but in terms of performance evaluation, science is so different from technology. If you are going to estimate the significance of a technology, you can measure the patent royalties. But if you are weighing up the influence of science breakthrough, that is based on how many people know it and how many think it useful for their future research, and this is what publication means,” he said.

From 2002 to 2012, Chinese scientists published 1.02 million sci-tech papers internationally, following US (the Chinese total output is around 40 percent to that of US). The total citation of these papers was 6.65 million times.

In the year 2011, 29.8 % of papers published by Chinese scientists had higher citation rate than the world average citation on the same subject.

“However, as for now China has so few top-ranking papers, or those with the top 10 percent citation rates, “ Wu said, “I would say that China is productive in papers, but the quality needs further improvement.”

The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, to provide a weathervane for China’s universities and research institutes, changed its evaluating criteria : before 2010, the institute ranks and publishes the country’s top 20 universities and top 20 institutes according to their number of SCI papers annually ; and since 2010, the sorting criteria was no longer the number of SCI papers, but the total citation of papers.

“I know there are criticisms over SCI, citation, or impact factors. What I want to explain is that paper publication itself is not the problem. The problem is that some people are putting the cart before the horse, that they research for publication instead of publishing after research,” he said.

“Impetuous atmosphere,” Wu summarizes the problem of the Chinese academia, or the world’s.

But how widespread is the impetuous wind? How many are already counting the words they could publish even before the research is started? No official survey is available for reference.