Isn't the population of China much bigger as well? Laws of percentages and what not can go along way. Has anyone displayed a percentage of rushed/inaccurate studies between countries to see if the lines normalize?
i saw such a chart a few days ago, specifically for withdrawn papers -- forgive me if i can't dig it up again but china made up something like 50% of the total number
Population of researchers != Population it's more than 4x as large in terms of population but only has ~25% more researchers while having around 50x the retractions.
> Isn't the population of China much bigger as well?
Yes, but official government stats have also been overstating the population a bit. I think it mostly affects the younger generation at present though.
lol I don’t know where you got this impression but during the one-child policy phase it’s widely known that people would underreport their kids to avoid fines. Why would the population be overstated?
> lol I don’t know where you got this impression but during the one-child policy phase it’s widely known that people would underreport their kids to avoid fines.
The news mostly. But also this guy[1], who I guess is using the leaked data. But even the official data shows a huge drop in the 0-4 bucket.
> Why would the population be overstated?
As I understand it[2], the local governments are reliant on two sources for income: land sales and money from the central government. Both are influenced by demographic change, so there's incentives to adjust the numbers upwards to keep revenue coming in.
If those certain countries have a very big population I'd say is more of a quantitative issue. If china had 10 scientists they couldn't pump as many papers, fake or good or not as if they're 1million scientists
