> papers from China have gone from sparse and poorly done imitations of western papers (~15-20 yrs ago), to innovative must reads if you want to stay on top of the field. Usually when I think of a new idea, it has already been done by some Chinese researcher.
Not germane to the main thread, but are the “new idea” papers written by Chinese authors mostly published in English, Chinese, or both?
If Chinese is part or all of the output, what method do non-Chinese reading researchers use to access the contents (e.g., AI translations, abstract journals, etc.)?
As a language nerd, I’m curious. I know that French, German, and Russian used to be (and sometimes still are) required languages for some graduate students so that they could access research texts in the original language. I wonder if that’s happening with Chinese now.
In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
*Chinese academics are far more bilingual than English-speaking ones.
Here in France, every academic I know, and I know quite a lot of them, are all perfectly fluent in English. Most of what they write is in English, or at the very least translated into it.
> Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones.
In what sense, since most of the western world doesn't have English as a native language, and many US researchers were born in other countries?
Sorry poor turn of phrase. I meant this in the sense of the publication language. Yes - most academics everywhere speak a few languages.
Chinese language publications may eventually serve the role of rapid communications, but for important results it will always be in English due to their ”trophy culture”.
That makes sense. The same trend is already happening in the west with Arxiv and Bioarxiv. Neither is as prestigious for the purpose of a lot of facility politics/rankings but in an active field both are more meaningful markers of the cutting edge than prestige publications like nature. I imagine these journals will retain their function as markers of prestige even as most of the community’s research output happens in more informal channels.
I recently read a paper on health benefits of cheese and looked at the authors and they were all from Chinese universities, was expecting a US agricultural university, like UC Davis does a lot of work on products of California and was unaware that cheese was any part of mainland China’s traditional nutrition sources, I.e. why did they study this?!