I cannot help but wonder how many decades it will take the U.S. to recover from the damage that the current administration is causing, both economically and in trust on a global scale. While in no way comparable, as a German, that topic feels familiar non the less - and to this day, it's a long and rocky road.

Again, I don't understand why this post is flagged. Don't hackers care about science? Isn't this newsworthy?

From the liked NBER study:

"Between 58 and 68 percent of citations to Chinese publications come from other Chinese publications, even for breakthrough work. This contrasts sharply with other regions, where cross-border citation rates are substantially higher."

https://www.nber.org/digest?page=1&perPage=50

Surely English fluency is somewhat relevant.

IIRC the citation clustering in the study was controlled for language -- they compared against non-English-speaking European countries with similar fluency gaps and the effect persisted. Though I could be misremembering that part.

Interesting.

I wonder if within my lifetime it is possible that Chinese will become the main language one has to learn to be on top of things, with English becoming more niche.

These shifts happen slowly I presume. There was a point where a lot of people learned French as a lingua franca, and it transitioned to English over decades.

German was the language of physics and chemistry until roughly 1945. That shift happened in about a decade, not generations. Though the citation insularity in the parent comment cuts against the Chinese-dominance thesis — hard to become a lingua franca when you're mostly reading yourself.

The framing is a bit misleading. If China accounts for a growing share of global publications, you'd expect within-country citations to rise just from probability. The comparison isn't apples-to-apples unless you control for publication volume.

The more Chinese publications, the bigger share of their citation rates, right?

The article charts a Nature survey that shows "percent trusting the scientific community" was sub-50% for both D's and R's from 1985-2015. That's more interesting and concerning to me than the relatively recent divergence in partisian opinion. I'd wager we return to that status quo within 10 years, but even that state seems dire.

… “Ignorance is strength” might was well be an official MAGA motto…

not according to this article. the attempt is to defund research, gov can make money out of thin air to an extent, but not indefinately, and it has to be paid for in real terms.

private interests have greater actual holdings than gov.

"they" are not winning, they are chasing a major provider of high standard of living, right out the door.

How is this affecting the replicability crisis?

China is increasing funding, US is cutting funding so this will only help China.

As is so typical in politics, whether it is countries, parties, or legislation, irony dominates the naming. Democratic People's Republic of Korea, PATRIOT act, MAGA, the list goes on.

Absolutely deleting progress.

NIH grant funding is still down about 35% and they’re lying about it. They’re not updating Reporter fully so the director has been able to obfuscate it. Graduate programs are reducing admissions and I imagine fewer potential scientists are interested in the PhD path given “current situation.” So I imagine it’s going to take several “good” years to undo what’s been done.

I hate that it happened because of a political reason, and many topics affected were unnecessarily targeted, but it’s 1000% true that many labs were overfunded, and accumulated resources which were essentially spent on ego bullshit. There need to be more cuts and selective funding of research labs, in general. Sadly, funding R1 does not guarantee that you’re going to get anything meaningful from that research as a non-trivial number of PIs just used excessive funding to bloat up their numbers to appear politically important, like middle managers at FAANG. So, essentially creating an adult daycare with no regards to output or impact. This needs to stop, and spending needs to be allocated responsibly. Lab impact needs to be assessed on regular (2-yr seems reasonable) basis, and then funding needs to be diverted to new or better players.

better to have some overfunded labs who are able to receive more PhD candidates, than underfunded labs who have to cut their graduate programs

besides, what happened was funding was cut altogether, not redirected from "underperforming and overfunded labs" to "high performing and worthy labs"

Give an empire-builder unlimited budget and you get an empire, not results. Seen this exact failure mode in engineering orgs. Headcount doubles, meaningful output stays flat. The bloat just compounds until someone finally cuts it.

Has anyone actually measured the lag between federal funding cuts and research output decline? I'd guess it's 5-10 years given grant cycles and PhD timelines -- which means we won't see the real damage in any metric for a while. By then it'll be blamed on something else.