[wfhbata]

Yes, I worked in academia up until recently, and keep up with the literature.

My comment was on the historical status of academia in the US as a whole (think last 120 years), not just the current state globally.

You’re lamenting the quality of academic publishing in particular. The US now publishes less than 17% of science and engineering papers, but its papers are often the most highly cited. So yes, there has been a huge increase in the number of papers, and number of low-quality papers, but this isn’t necessarily being driven by the US, as the original comment would have implied.

You claim researchers don’t really trust articles anymore, and I agree that it takes a lot more work to filter out the noise now, and I’m less optimistic that authors are presenting an honest, objective appraisal of their results. But significant research is still happening, and academic publishing is still the primary way that information is disseminated. People seem to rely more on name recognition (author, school, journal) now. It probably varies field but field. I’m in a field where results are often proof-based and that tends to be harder to fake.

[jampekka]

I don't consider countries much. There are definitely some differences per country, but I think the variation even within a same university is so large that its hard to infer much based on country of origin. But I acknowledge that I ignored that part of your comment in my reply and maybe in that left a wrong impression. But I meant no implication that this was somehow US-driven.

Internationalism is so ingrained in the academic culture (at least on fields I'm familiar with) that it doesn't even really register what country somebody's from or is working in. There are definitely some differences especially in the more "overt" parts of the culture (hats and robes and different titles etc), but these are of very little significance for anything but some ceremonies.

My working experience is from Finland, Sweden and UK, but in academia people come and go between countries very frequently so colleagues tend to be from all over.

There are at least some stereotypes that some countries are more prone to the e.g. citation rings, but I don't find that very relevant, as I think the whole system is quite broken and the publishing (at least in English language) forums are typically not country specific at all. Probably something like this happens in more or less any country.