I was alerted recently to an article that analyzed the system of monetary rewards offered to authors of scientific papers in China.1 The article examined over 150 published policies adopted by about 100 Chinese universities, designed to reward the first/corresponding author of a Web-of-Science-indexed paper with monetary rewards that scale with either the impact factor of the journal or the number of citations a paper receives in a defined period of time. Some of the numbers presented are quite staggering, including an estimate of up to U.S. $165,000 being awarded to authors of papers published in Science and/or Nature (the average award for such publications is about U.S. $45,000). While the awarded amounts drop substantially even for other reputed journals, they are still significant, given that the net annual monetary award could well be a significant fraction of (and in some cases multiples of) the base annual salary of a professor, the article refers to this scenario as publish or impoverish, a cunning play on the publish or perish culture that is prevalent in academia.
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