The hurdles and hardships of science in China

In my last post on China I discussed why China is becoming a scientific juggernaut. I focussed on all the things that seem to be working in its favour (funding, high expectations on scientists, etc.). While I do think that science in China is good and getting better, it is also important to point out some of the hurdles and limitations that hold back some aspects of scientific advance here.

In my previous post I noted that the expectations placed on students and researchers (i.e., to produce a minimum number of papers in journals with high impact factors, IFs) provided motivation to do good science. This is undoubtedly true, however, these strict expectations also reinforce a strategy of ‘paper-chasing’ where students are encourage to figure out how to get a paper. This is because the reward structure is so quantitative. While this type of evaluation systems has pros and cons, it does create a different sense of urgency than I’ve experienced elsewhere.

Pragmatic factors

The Great Fire Wall of China from "Cracks appear in the Great Fire Wall of China" posted by the China Daily Mail, Sep. 25th 2013.

I have never yelled at my computer or cursed the internet as much as I have in China. In the west we often hear about the ‘Great Firewall of China’ and probably do not think much about what this actually means. It sucks. The internet barely functions for significant proportions of the working day. I thought that this might have to do with the number of people and lack of infrastructure, but I no longer believe this to be true. Other countries in the region have great internet, and China has very advanced infrastructure. I’m pretty sure that when there is high traffic, the national security protocols and activity monitoring servers are the bottleneck.

Because the government policy is to block certain websites, most of the scientific internet websites and data sharing portals are not accessible here, but this may change at any given time. For example: Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook, Blog sites, Twitter, Google Maps, and Google Scholar are all services routinely used by scientists and which are blocked in China. The reason for these to be blocked, as far as I understand it, is that they do not share users’ activities and the government cannot monitor what individuals share and download (which reinforces the value of these services to me). I also suspect that they are blocked to give local companies a chance to succeed without competition from global corporations, or perhaps simply because of disagreements with the companies.

I have had immense trouble trying to share files with my lab back in Canada (and to post this blog entry –which is why I’m doing it from Cambodia!). I am not currently engaging in social media –something that I saw as a legitimate activity for communicating science. I am having a very hard time searching for articles without Google Scholar. I also have trouble with other websites that should not be blocked, but that use third party encryption. For example, I can’t log in to my University library in Toronto, and I couldn’t connect my Canadian grant application to the Canadian Common CV (which we are required to do in Canada) because the CCV web interface was blocked (I had to get my post doc in Canada to do it for me). I have tried to go to researchers’ websites to find that they are blocked because they use a blogging site (e.g., Wordpress). The amount of time I spend doing basic online professional activities has increased 3 to 4-fold.

This is important because Chinese scientists are at a disadvantage when it comes to international collaboration and participating in online initiatives. I would encourage scientists outside of China to consider these imposed limitations to ensure that information and collaboration is barrier-free. Here are some tips:

1. Don’t link to your Google scholar publications on the publications page of your website
2. Don’t use a blog site to host your website (e.g., Wordpress)
3. Don’t use Dropbox or Google drive to collaborate on papers
4. Don’t use gmail as your work e-mail, Air China, for example, won’t send e-mails to gmail.
5. Social media has emerged as a great way to communicate with broader communities, it is important to recognize that these dialogues exclude Chinese scientists.
6. Ironically, as I write in this blog, blogs are blocked and while blogs provide a great platform to discuss ideas and issues, they are not available to Chinese scientists. 

These last two are interesting as journals increasingly require or request tweets or blog posts to help maximize exposure, but these forms of communication are not on scientists’ radar here.

Chinese science has been increasing by leaps and bounds despite these limitations. This is a testament to the hard work and dedication by Chinese scientists. I have no doubts that basic scientific research in China will continue to increase its stature and impact.

Postscript

One thing that is interesting to me is that many of the graduate students here use VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to mask their IP addresses. They are able to access blogs, Google Scholar, etc. In conversations with people, VPN use is extremely widespread and successful at circumventing government filters, most of the time (there seems to be an arms race between the government and VPNs). It really makes me wonder how much longer these governmental controls can be realistically maintained.

Paper of the lustrum*

(*lustrum = five years)

I’m co-teaching (with Kendi Davies and Julian Resasco) a graduate seminar focused on current trends and advances in community ecology. It’s been great, and having a small group with varied backgrounds (disease ecology, microbial ecology, restoration, community ecology theory, etc) allows for flexible and interesting discussions. Somehow the topic last week drifted to favourite papers, and we ended up with a plan to choose and defend the paper that was—in our opinion—the best one published in ecology in the last 5 years.

Today we described and defended our choices and tried to decide what the ‘best’ actually means, anyways. I don’t think anyone quite realised just how difficult this exercise would be. First, 5 years isn’t actually a very long time when measured in academic publishing years. That’s only the time of the average PhD, or less than the entire tenure-track period. I immediately thought of several papers I love, only to realize that sadly, they were from before 2010 (e.g. papers like these). 

Nearly everyone started their search the same way: with a Google Scholar search, looking at the most cited papers between 2010-2015. Some people looked at the most popular papers from high impact journals (Ecology Letters, Science, Nature, PNAS, etc); others looked at the output of eminent ecologists during that time period. At least one used his committee members for advice, and for the new grad students this was a nice crash course in the recent literature. Citations, quality journals, or eminent names might have been starting points for finding these papers, but it was interesting how little these actually seemed to matter. When defending their choice of paper, absolutely no one mentioned citations or journal as deciding factors. 

The papers we chose, and why: 

Conceptual synthesis in community ecology. (The Quarterly Review of Biology) Vellend 2010  

This was my choice, although I went back and forth between a short list of papers. For me, the ‘best’ paper had to either change how we do ecology, or how we think about ecology. I think Vellend 2010 has a lot of value as a pedagogical tool, and a device for organizing ecological knowledge. It has the potential to aggregate the varied, context dependent data that ecologists have been collecting for generations. Further, rather than the disjointed approach my undergraduate texts took for community ecology (productivity here, lynx-hare plot there), a single framework should help students understand community ecology as a cohesive set of ideas. And I admire papers that have big ideas.

A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity. (Science) Jinek et al. 2012 

 This was a cool choice, because it turns out to be a massively important development that many of the less molecularly-inclined knew little about. This paper introduced the use of CRISPR/Cas for gene editing. The CRISPR system is been found in archaea and bacteria, and provides a form of adaptive immunity against viruses. Importantly, it has been developed for use in incredibly precise genome editing that is heritable. It has massive implications for the study of evolution, microbial ecology, disease, population genetics, and everything in between. It is also the source of ethical concerns because it can (and has) be used to modify human embryos. 

Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity. (Nature) Cardinale et al. 2012 

This was the choice of two students, so it may have been the de facto winner. It is a massively cited paper (>1000), and both students chose it in part because it makes a clear contribution to human welfare and society. It represents a massive undertaking (they analysed more than 1000 papers) reviewing research on how biodiversity relates to a large number of relevant ecosystem services. In particular, Table 1 (below) can be used for applied and basic research, and shows where research and data agree, disagree, or are lacking. This is certainly a must read for ecologists.

Why intraspecific trait variation matters in community ecology. (TREE) Bolnick et al. 2011. 

This paper helped to concentrate and inspire research on intraspecific variation and to highlight the areas of research that are still poorly studied (and it actually made my short list too). There is obvious variation within species (long acknowledged as important to evolution, starting with Darwin) but this is often ignored in community ecology. Bolnick et al. point out the many possible and important implications that arise from such variation. The writing is clear and highlights extremely well the general mechanisms that might interact with intraspecific variation. For the student who chose it, it was inspiring enough when it first came out, that they changed their research direction. 

Table 1: Bolnick et al. 

Bottom-up regulation of malaria population dynamics in mice co-infected with lung-migratory nematodes. (Ecology Letters) Griffith et al. 2015  

This paper was chosen in an opposite fashion: it is brand new, and rather than having inspired current research, the student thought it would inspire future approaches. The paper integrates community ecology and disease ecology in a novel and sophisticated way, advancing an area of research currently receiving a lot of attention. In this paper, mice are ‘mesocosms’ in which the importance of bottom-up versus top-down control of infection (by malaria and a nematode) could be tested. (Quote: "It's a real page-turner"). 

Global marine bacterial diversity peaks at high latitudes in winter. (ISME) Ladau et al. 2013. 

This was another paper chosen because it inspired the student's current studies. Ladau et al. brought together a massive data set for marine bacterial biodiversity, allowing them to map it on a global scale and develop predictive distribution models. Interestingly, they found that diversity patterns were lower at the equator, contrary to typical findings in other organisms. The student cited the careful methodology, extensive data, and comparison of results to those in macro-scale systems as the paper’s strengths. 

From Ladau et al. "Maps of predicted global marine bacterial diversity. Color scale shows relative richness of marine surface waters as predicted by SDM. Samples were rarefied to 4266 rDNA sequences to enable accurate estimation of relative richness patterns on a global scale from data sets with different sequencing depths. True richness is expected to exceed estimated values. (a) In December, OTU richness peaks in temperate and higher latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. (b) In June, OTU richness peaks in temperate latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere..."

Plant functional traits and the multidimensional nature of species coexistence. (PNAS). Kraft, Godoy, Levine. 2015.  

The final paper was Kendi’s choice. Community ecology has struggled with weak connections between pattern and process. The experimental and quantitative work coming from this research group has provided multiple examples for how to connect theory, statistics, and experimental results in a very rigourous fashion. In this paper, the focus is particularly on functional/trait approaches to community assembly and coexistence, and the authors manage to connect careful experimental data with Chessonian coexistence theory, using trait data to estimate species’ fitness and niche differences, and then using these to predict species coexistence.

After the fact, of course, lots of other great papers came to mind. It isn't really possible to choose one best paper, either. But the characteristics people looked for in a great paper were pretty similar - inspiring, providing novel approaches to particular questions, focused on big questions or ideas, and making contributions that go beyond academic ecology.