[lellotope]

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).

[chalst]

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.