I started noticing this trend about 15 years ago. There was this point where I suddenly started receiving solicitation spam from pay to publish Chinese journals. It was obvious they didn’t know who I was or what my work consisted of. It was very easy to jump to the conclusion that this was a huge push on the part of China to get their national pub counts boosted, and on the part of a large number of academics who were totally just looking to get their papers in print.

Whenever I see a pub in a journal I don’t know, and I’m interested enough to bother, I’ll check the impact factor (imperfect but established) and the other papers published by the author(s).

I think I’ve paid to publish all of my papers to make them open access - I’d always build that into my budgets. But this is on a whole other level. I always think of this when a paper like the NYT compares Chinese to US science using publication counts.

There are brilliant Chinese scientists and research institutions, but there’s also a lot of gaming the system. We need a better quality metric for publications and papers.