A perennial topic around here has been the state of scientific research in China (and other up-and-coming nations). There’s no doubt that the number of scientific publications from China has been increasing (be sure to read the comments to that post; there’s more to it than I made of it). But many of these papers, on closer inspection, are junk, and are published in junk journals of no impact whatsoever. Mind you, that’s not an exclusively Chinese problem – Sturgeon’s Law is hard to get away from, and there’s a lot of mediocre (and worse than mediocre) stuff coming out of every country’s scientific enterprise.
But what about patents? The last couple of years have seen many people predicting that China would soon be leading the world in patent applications as well, which can be the occasion for pride or hand-wringing, depending on your own orientation. But there’s a third response: derision. And that’s what Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang provide in the Wall Street Journal. They think that most of these filings are junk: