Do you believe that China published more papers than everyone else put together in the same period?
I helped run a large international conference recently, with 900 published papers. Of these 66 (7.3%) were from China, and 280 (31%) from the US. Germany had 104 (12%). The numbers will vary by field, of course, but I've no reason to believe that this meeting was an outlier.
>Do you believe that China published more papers than everyone else put together in the same period?
I don't hold a belief, I haven't seen data that you seemed to be using to make conclusions. Or you're making somewhat large assumptions based on a few pieces of information. A little is different than a lot, both could have a little or a lot though.
> I've no reason to believe that this meeting was an outlier
Here's one, it was presumably run across the Pacific ocean from China.
You’re trying too hard. There is no reason to believe that China is publishing papers faster than the rest of the world put together, unless you have data to that effect.
China is big, but not bigger than everyone else put together. Less than one person in six is Chinese.
And your presumption happens to be accurate, but 1 in 3 editions of the conference happen in Asia including China and China is still out-published by the USA by 4 to 1 or so even when the event is held in China. Chinese outnumber Americans five to one. Americans outpublish Chinese people many times over. As an aside, Swiss people outpublish Americans 8 to 1.
So, while skepticism is noble, when a country of 1/6 the people in the world has a retraction rate higher than everyone else put together, you need extraordinary data to decide that they are not in a mess. And “I don’t have data” is no such argument.
So in a discussion about research fraud, you're chastising me for wanting data you call important, putting complete trust in the data of a blog that you haven't seen, and posted random data you claim to have helped collect without giving me any reason to believe it's accurate.
Looking for retraction watch's numbers gave me a study that shows the US having the most retractions.[1] So again, if rates are what is important, you need data showing the rates.
