Focus academic attention on research not material rewards

AT THE END OF THE YEAR, large numbers of annual conferences, forums and lectures sponsored by various parties are staged, and almost all of them invite star scholars or expert speakers to participate. Beijing Youth Daily comments:

China's academic research on the economy and social development lags behind the country's economic and social development. The most influential research findings on modern China are not from home, but abroad.

An important cause of the problem is that a number of leading scholars and researchers in these fields are more prone to attend the well-paid events than to conduct real academic research.

At the events, which are sponsored by enterprises, governments, media and think tanks, it is not rare to see that some scholars propose suggestions and advice on hot topics far beyond their disciplines or research capacities, which sometimes sends out misleading, if not wrong, messages to decision-makers and society.

Some academic brokers are always busy looking for "experts" to give a gloss to these activities at this time of a year. Under their arrangements, some star experts are so busy that the only time they secure for thinking or reading is when they travel on the plane as some confess.

In other words, these scholars have become a piper of the activity sponsors, as they must play to the tunes decided by the payers. And it is no secret that many research reports and lectures bearing the star scholars' names are largely done by their assistants or even students.

Their cozy academic life comes from the fact that there is still no effective evaluation system to prompt them to divert their attention from the number of their papers to the quality. It is often the case that once a scholar wins his or her professorship, his or her academic research will enter a leisurely second half, during which applying for funded research projects and reaping appearance fees become their main tasks.

The lack of time, independence and professionalism deprives their research of quality. The fast development of China should have provided the scholars with invaluable firsthand research materials. But they have largely wasted them.