Isn't the population of China much bigger as well? Laws of percentages and what not can go along way. Has anyone displayed a percentage of rushed/inaccurate studies between countries to see if the lines normalize?
i saw such a chart a few days ago, specifically for withdrawn papers -- forgive me if i can't dig it up again but china made up something like 50% of the total number
Population of researchers != Population it's more than 4x as large in terms of population but only has ~25% more researchers while having around 50x the retractions.
> Isn't the population of China much bigger as well?
Yes, but official government stats have also been overstating the population a bit. I think it mostly affects the younger generation at present though.
lol I don’t know where you got this impression but during the one-child policy phase it’s widely known that people would underreport their kids to avoid fines. Why would the population be overstated?
> lol I don’t know where you got this impression but during the one-child policy phase it’s widely known that people would underreport their kids to avoid fines.
The news mostly. But also this guy[1], who I guess is using the leaked data. But even the official data shows a huge drop in the 0-4 bucket.
> Why would the population be overstated?
As I understand it[2], the local governments are reliant on two sources for income: land sales and money from the central government. Both are influenced by demographic change, so there's incentives to adjust the numbers upwards to keep revenue coming in.
e: recollection was slightly off but it is actually much worse! https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11948-017-9939-6
china is truly in a league of its own with this stuff, by literal orders of magnitude