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Let's not forget that there's a market for all the junk, and it's not the scientists. There's a close parallel with AI slop - it's not aimed at people but at advertisers, the goal is SEO. Same with fake papers and pay-to-publish journals. That stuff is aimed at administrators, because faculty nowadays need publications for promotion, and the admin has no idea about quality but can count.

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Some institutions in China were literally paying their scientists cash bonuses for getting papers published in Western scholarly journals. That policy has now been scaled back, but as you can imagine it had a corrosive effect. We have to assume by default that any paper out of China since circa 1990 is fraudulent until proven otherwise.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/07/12/150506/the-truth...

Oh, the West is no better, at certain institutions tenure means n number of papers, no questions asked where.

We have to assume by default that any paper out of China since circa 1990 is fraudulent until proven otherwise

What's that xenophobic language? You are not a scientist, are you? In science you learn pretty quickly who you can trust, and there's excellent work coming out of China these days.

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