Look at the two "fifth in the world" calmly 2065438+00March 08 07:58 Jiefang Daily

Our reporter Xu Ruizhe

Recently, China has won two consecutive "fifth places in the world", both of which are quantitative rankings of internationally influential organizations: First, according to the data of Thomson Reuters Group, the number of scientific papers published by China ranks "fifth in the world"; Second, according to the data of the World Intellectual Property Organization, the number of international patent applications in China ranks fifth in the world.

Assessing the level of scientific and technological development of countries by the total amount, China's strength is indeed extraordinary; However, if we look closely at the two lists, we can find that the "quality ranking" of China's scientific and technological indicators is not ideal, and it faces the embarrassment that quantity and quality are "out of sync" and "different speeds".

The number of citations of a single paper is "failure"

The ranking of the top 20 countries (regions) published by Thomson Reuters Group in recent ten years includes three single indicators: the total number of published papers, the total number of citations and the number of citations of a single paper. According to the total number of papers, the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain and China occupy the top five in turn. Among them, the United States * * * published more than 2.97 million SCI (Science Citation Index) papers, three times as many as the second-ranked Japanese and China published more than 650,000 SCI papers in the same period.

Scientific research papers are valuable because they have contributed verified experimental and theoretical achievements to the scientific community, which can be repeatedly cited by scientists in other countries as new scientific arguments. Just like "famous sayings" are frequently quoted, the more times they are quoted, the greater their influence. Generally speaking, important papers of Nobel Prize winners can be cited hundreds to thousands of times.

In this ranking, according to the "total cited times" of papers, the top four countries (regions) are still in the top four, but the ranking has changed slightly, followed by the United States, Germany, Britain and Japan; China, once the "fifth", was not only replaced by the French, but also "left behind" all the way, ranking ninth after Canadian, Italian and Dutch. It can be seen that China's huge total number of papers still ensures a relatively large total number of citations.

However, the most important index of further investigation on the quality of papers, "the number of citations of a single paper", has greatly disrupted the original ranking. On average, each paper published in Switzerland was cited 15.73 times, the highest; American papers are "large in quantity" and "high in quality", and the citation rate of each paper also exceeds 15 times, ranking second; Followed by Denmark, the Netherlands, Scotland, England and so on. China's "citation times of a single paper" did not reach the "minimum threshold"-each article 10.52 times, with an average of only 5.24 times, slightly higher than that of India (5.08 times).

It should be noted that this "hard index" of China's thesis has entered the range of "5 times" from "4.6 times" in 2008. Although there is still a big gap with the world average of "10 times", it is not easy to achieve such an improvement in just one year-Wuyishan, chief engineer of China Institute of Science and Technology Information, commented.

Enterprises that have entered the top patent 100 only have single digits.

According to the data of international patent applications in 2009 recently released by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), WIPO received 155900 international patent applications throughout the year. Among them, the United States * * * applied for 45,800 patents, still ranking first in the world, accounting for about 30% of the global share. The second place is Japan, with 29,800 pieces; Germany ranked third, 1.67 million pieces; South Korea is slightly ahead of China, with 8066 pieces; China ranks fifth in the world with 7946 pieces, ahead of France, Britain, Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden.

The number of patent applications in China increased by one place compared with the previous year, and the number increased rapidly. Affected by the international financial crisis, the number of global patent applications declined for the first time in 30 years last year, but the number of patent applications in China rose against the trend, with a year-on-year increase of about 30%, ranking first among major countries in the world.

There are both "quantity" and "speed" of patents in China, but the situation of patent applicants is not so optimistic. Taking the global enterprise patent rankings as an example, Matsushita of Japan became the "patent king". In 2009, * * * applied for patent 189 1, accounting for 6% of all Japanese patents. Francis Ghali, Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, disclosed that among the top 20 companies that applied for the most patents, almost all were American, Japanese and European companies.

At present, among the top 100 enterprises in the world, China enterprises are only single digits, and only a few "old faces" such as Huawei, ZTE, Datang Telecom and Tencent can enter the top 200. Among them, Huawei is particularly prominent, with the international patent of 1847 following Panasonic, becoming the "runner-up" in the annual application volume. However, if we think calmly from a national perspective, Huawei's international patents account for a quarter of China's, and together with another company in Shenzhen, ZTE, they account for 40% of the country's total-which can't be said to be "too concentrated".

The structure of papers and patents is unbalanced.

As a late-developing country, China's science and technology has greatly increased-Thomson Reuters Group reported that the number of papers in China today is 64 times that in the early 1980s. At this rate, China will surpass the United States and become the world's largest scientific research country in 2020; The Financial Times also predicts that China will replace the United States as the country with the largest scientific and intellectual property rights in the world in 2020, referring to the growth rate of international patent applications in China.

It may not be difficult to become "the largest country", because China has a huge scientific research population, and because of the stimulating effect of the evaluation mechanism of the science and technology system, papers and patents have always been linked to factors such as professional titles, salaries and project evaluation, which is also a "booster" for its rapid increase. According to the report "Science and Engineering Indicators 20 10" issued by the National Science Foundation of the United States, there are about1420,000 researchers in China, and the expansion rate is more than twice that of the United States. In China, there are only about 2 researchers per 1000 employed population, which is far from the "7.2" of Germany, a powerful country in science and technology.

Therefore, we must not be carried away by these two "fifth in the world". With the advantage of population and the late-comer effect, it should not be a problem for China to surpass various technological powers in a short time. The key is to pay more attention to the inherent quality of papers and patents, especially the unbalanced structure.

Papers and patents are not the final products of science and technology. Some people do papers for papers and apply for patents for patents. The success rate of achievement transformation is not high, and the industrialization benefit is not high. According to the data released by China National Intellectual Property Administration, in 2009, the number of domestic patent applications in Shanghai reached 62,000, ranking fifth in China, but the patent conversion rate was only about 10%. At the same time, the quality of patents in China is still insufficient: the most valuable "invention patents" only accounted for1/4 of all kinds of patents in China in 2009; The most variety of patents in China is "design patents", which accounts for about 1/4 of the global registration.

China's papers and patents also show the imbalance of disciplines. According to the statistics of China Institute of Science and Technology Information, there are many papers in the fields of chemistry, computer, physics and materials science, but there are obviously few papers in the fields of immunology, psychology, microbiology, social science and agronomy. According to the report of the World Intellectual Property Organization, China's patent R&D strength in biotechnology, medicine, transportation and other technical fields is not far from that of developed countries. At the same time, the geographical distribution of patents is not balanced. Last year, the number of international patent applications from Shenzhen reached more than 3,800, accounting for nearly half of the country.

Perhaps, the latest evaluation of "China's Status and Influence in World Science" completed by China Institute of Science and Technology is more objective: China's influence in the world is not high, ranking 13 among 19 major countries, and "China still has a long way to go before it truly surpasses the traditional scientific power".

The debate about "the retention or abolition of undergraduate graduation thesis" originated from a sentence by Zhang Xiaoyuan, director of the journalism department of the School of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University. He believes that it is difficult for journalism undergraduates to meet the requirement of "having original opinions in a certain field", so students have to copy and paste a lot in order to complete their tasks. His views have been supported by many netizens. In the survey of a website, the number of people in favor of canceling the "undergraduate graduation thesis" is nearly 8 times that of the opponents. A professor at Chengdu University of Electronic Technology, who asked not to be named, also bluntly said: "Before graduation, look at the advertisements of' gunmen' on campus, and you will know whether the current college thesis is meaningful." A student admitted that the thesis defense teacher turned a blind eye to students' plagiarism in order to let most people pass, and defense became a procedure for students to graduate, just going through the motions. Even the heads of some news organizations agreed to cancel the undergraduate graduation thesis of journalism. They think that the cancellation of undergraduate graduation thesis is not only because of "too much water", but also to solve the problem of serious disconnection between university education and practice.