I'm skeptical of citation rate as well, although I'm not sure I have anything better to offer in terms of metrics. Hype, after all, is related to citation rate. I think what we need is something that is more like "sustained rate" or something like that.

It's pretty clear China is progressing in the sciences substantially, so I don't want to discount that--no one should--but this progression is occurring in what I consider to be a crisis of academic integrity globally. The result is that metrics like publication rate and citation rate are much fuzzier to interpret, and something I distrust a lot because they are somewhat meaningless relative to replicability or something of that sort.

I generally feel like academics and industry at large is suffering from a kind of hype crisis or bubble. I think it's strongly related to income inequality (inflated attributed value of higher-income individuals relative to lower-income individuals) and all sorts of other societal problems at the moment. How this relates to China I'm not sure but overall it makes me skeptical of any attempt to measure or rank countries relative to one another (I'd say the same thing about the US or any other country for that matter).

I have been thinking about kinds of citation rates that distinguish between "trendy" journals, ones what attract lots of citations relatively quickly, and "deep impact journals", where papers published tend to be cited a long time later.

Given this classification, you can weight an individuals impact factor by a factor representing how trendy vs deep the venues citations appear in.

Publications and citations don't really matter. All that matters at the end of the day is patents [1]. That's the real story here, this is all about patents and IP. The entire Chinese university system is being forcefully redesigned to become a machine that systematically produces high-value patents.

The goal here is very much to beat the US at its own game [2]. The US and Western Europe have trapped the whole world in an extremely harsh intellectual property regime and China, rather than fighting this regime, intends to dominate it.

It's very sad because what's being ultimately being legitimized is just Feudalism 3.0. It's also very corrosive to China's real strength, it's entrepreneurial spirit, which, until very recently, gave fuck all about patents. Now many Asian VCs won't even talk to you unless you have some valuable IP. Many people view this rapid "IP enclosure" in China, where IP is becoming everything and often the only thing, to be a very bad thing.

[1] http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2018/article_0002....

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/china-watch/business/...

There is certainly good research coming out of China, but there are also journals set up to primarily publish articles citing their own papers, or papers in peer journals to boost citations...

I don't know if you know this but that it's a China only thing, most groups cough self cite because everyone does.

Citations are so easy to game though: you just need to create citation rings and that number can rise quickly along with a bunch of mediocre publications.