Controversy after the

Big bonuses for published studies can affect the professionalism of Chinese scientists.

The financial rewarding method for academic articles published in foreign science journals has contributed to improving China's position in the international scientific community, according to the South China Morning Post. But a study published in early July suggested that these bonuses would make scientists more interested in financial issues than accuracy in research.

Chen Bikun, associate professor at the School of Economics and Management at Nanjing University of Science and Technology, reviewed various reward policies applied by 100 universities in China for 17 years. by.

The results showed that, from 1999 to 2016, Chinese academicians received about 30-165,000 USD for each article published in international journals. The amount of bonuses has increased significantly over the past decade. For example, the average bonus for each article published in Nature or Science increased by 67%, from $ 26,212 in 2008 to $ 43,783 in 2016, more than 20 times the professor's annual salary.

Last month, the research group of Professor Chen Xuewei and colleagues at Sichuan Agricultural University, China, received a reward of $ 2 million for an article in the journal Cell about the method of treating fungi in rice. This is twice the bonus of the Nobel Prize in 2016.

High bonuses can reduce the quality of many research projects in China.(Photo: Stephen Chen).

Xuewei and colleagues' research results are very reliable, but the huge amount of money they receive has become a topic of discussion around the world, raising questions about whether to use huge amounts of money. to reward scientists' research.

In China, Nanjing University in Jiangsu Province was the first to conduct a monetary reward for scientific articles in the 1990s, according to Chen's research. Other universities quickly imitate and make their own reward plans.

Although the initial reward was only $ 25, it greatly increased the number of scientific articles by famous universities in China. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the number of articles published internationally increased 17 times between 1996 and 2014, from 13,134 to 232,070 articles.

"Financial incentives are often used in the field of business to reward employees with outstanding achievements. But now many universities in China are rewarding money for scientists about the achievements of research. " said Chen.

Chen said China's reward policy has been quite successful, as the country's number of international publications has exponentially increased over the past 20 years. But there has been a situation where many Chinese scholars have sent articles to international journals rather than to disseminate knowledge and be recognized by the scientific community.

Chen led the case of a material scientist at Heilongjiang University, northeastern China, with more than 250 articles published in a single magazine in the period 2004-2009 and carrying over half of the total bonuses of Heilongjiang University.

Along with posting articles in international journals, the revisions of Chinese scientists with their research also increased significantly. In 2016, there were 1,234 corrections in Chinese scientific articles, while in 1996 this number was only two. These figures are published in the context of increasing concerns about academic fraud in China including plagiarism, dishonest results, fake papers.

"That makes Western scientists frown, because they consider this bonus form to be an eye-opener , " the commentary in last week's MIT Technology Review magazine emphasized. "For them, revered science like the search for truth cannot be influenced by personal interests."