Senior biologist Zhang Hong, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, warns that China’s boom in research papers may be a ‘false prosperity’ risking genuine innovation.
Senior biologist Zhang Hong, a member of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, has warned that China’s surge in research papers might represent a ‘false prosperity’ that endangers true innovation. In an article shared by science communication outlet The Intellectual on its social media on Monday, he described how projects are often inflated in scale to secure publications in elite journals like Science, Nature, or Cell, which are then leveraged for academic titles and additional resources.
“You often hear people boasting about publishing a paper that costs tens of millions of yuan in a top journal like Science, Nature or Cell. What they’re really showing off is how many resources they control,” Zhang said.
This approach excels at pursuing hot topics and scaling up existing ideas—known as “1-to-100” science—but it has crowded out the space, culture, and funding essential for groundbreaking “zero-to-one” innovations, according to Zhang, who works at the Institute of Biophysics in Beijing.