@cm0002

The Uncesco has long been questioning the value of such universities ranking as misuse is very widespread. Last February, the London School of Economics published an article claiming, ‘Predatory university rankings jeopardise the value of Webometrics’, showing how mirror sites and an emergent market for predatory rankings threatens the project’s future.

But the most important bit is notably OP who is relentlessly posting anti-Western, pro-China content, including cross-posts from ml communities like this one, talking down Canada while praising China.

China has a lot of good researchers (I know some of them), but the ‘rise’ in overstated, and it’s by intention. As one computer scientist write a few months ago, ‘Don’t Trust the Rankings That Put China’s Universities on Top’ (archived link,

It’s true that Chinese universities have made remarkable strides, and some of them host superb centers of research and education. However, they aren’t nearly as dominant as those rankings suggest. To borrow a phrase from Mao Zedong, many Chinese universities are paper tigers: They churn out papers at a ferocious pace, but the quality of these publications is too often in question …

For a long time, it was common for Chinese universities to award cash payments for publications as a way to boost the share of papers their researchers placed in international journals; the more prestigious the journal, the higher the payout. According to one analysis, publishing a single paper in Nature or Science fetched more than $43,000 on average in 2016, with one university doling out a $165,000 bonus. Obviously, scholars in America and elsewhere also have incentives to publish, especially as they work to gain tenure. But even modest cash rewards can invite rushed, shoddy or outright fraudulent research, which is why this practice is frowned upon here.

In 2020, the Chinese government issued new guidance that banned monetary rewards for publications and sought to promote quality over quantity. However, the excessive pressure to publish is still present, as are its consequences for academic integrity. A Chinese researcher quoted in a 2024 study argued that an “inhumane” — harsh and unrealistic — demand for research productivity essentially made academic misconduct a necessity. This climate paved the way for paper mills — large-scale operations that sell authorship of fabricated or plagiarized papers — with some so brazen that they hawk their services by reportedly handing out business cards in the hallways of Chinese hospitals …