Premier Jiang Yi-huah is calling for a rethink of the current academic evaluation mechanism following a peer review fraud scandal.
The premier made the comments Thursday in a Cabinet meeting. Earlier this week, Education Minister Chiang Wei-ling resigned after he was implicated in a peer review scandal. Chiang was said to be linked to a Taiwanese scholar who allegedly faked peer reviews of his papers.
In the Cabinet meeting, the premier said that scholars’ research performance is currently assessed by the number of papers published in journals indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). He said this evaluation system has led to an over-emphasis on the quantity instead of the quality of the papers.
The premier instructed the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Technology to review the evaluation system and to find ways to address the problems.