> Research papers are considered higher quality the more they are cited by others. At one point, links directed to a webpage were considered a metric of qualit

> Research papers are considered higher quality the more they are cited by others. At one point, links directed to a webpage were considered a metric of quality too, and then we realized that this could be gamed or at least be misleading in some circumstances. I'm not a member of academia who is embedded deep in the world of research papers every day, but I wouldn't fully trust any metric like this about China without a real deep dive into the numbers and seeing who is doing the citing. Maybe the article goes into it more, but I'm not a subscriber and cannot see.