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Chinese funding boost produces quantity over quality

Image: Gang Liu, via Shutterstock

Analysis of increased grant sizes suggests improved internationalisation but underlying problems, say authors

A major boost to research funding from the Chinese government appears to have driven up the quantity of outputs such as papers, but not their quality.

China has aggressively ramped up research funding in recent years. Its biggest public funding agency, the National Natural Science Foundation, increased its budget from 18 million yuan (£2 million) at the time of its founding in 1986 to 28.6 billion in 2017. This has led to a surge in research output, with China overtaking the US for the first time in 2016 for total number of science publications produced each year.

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