Beijing, June 10, 2009 – A symposium aimed at scientifically assessing talent flow among research institutions has received wide responses and hot discussions among Chinese academia.

 

The “Attracting and Evaluating Academic Talent Summit”, jointly organized by Elsevier’s Science & Technology division China and China’s leading science magazine Science News Bi-weekly on 2 June, gathered presidents of leading Chinese universities, top scientists, personnel officials of research institutions and policy researchers. It is the first event focused on discussing academic talent evaluation in China.

 

The event took place just days after the first batch of winners of the One-Thousand-Talent scheme, the largest government-sponsored brain attraction in the country, was revealed. The One-Thousand-Talent scheme plans to attract up to 1000 leading figures in academia and industries in five years to work full-time in China.

 

The scheme becomes the focus of symposium.

 

Zhang Jie, president of China’s flagship Shanghai Jiaotong University, reveals that thanks to the university’s delicate talent strategy, it has attracted up to five One-Thousand-Talent scholars.

 

The president told the symposium that Shanghai Jiaotong University plans to attract up to 800 professors from overseas.

 

“Among the 45，596 newly obtained research-based PhDs in the United States in 2006, 10 per cent came from the Chinese mainland. With China’s fast economic development and global financial crisis, more Chinese students are expected to return, who will form a solid base for China to develop the world’s top universities,” says Zhang.

 

Zhang was echoed by Shi Yigong, deputy dean of Tsinghua University’s Life Science College and former professor at Princeton University.

 

To Shi, to attract top talents back to China is not only for some individual researches, but for improving the domestic academic environment as a whole.

 

“Good disciplined overseas Chinese scientists should return in groups to form a new, healthier academic atmosphere. That’s why I proposed a scheme to the top policymakers which later changed to the One-Thousand-Talent scheme.” Shi says.

 

But it is important to evaluate talents while attracting them to China, according to Zhang Chunting, a top bioinformatics expert in Tianjin University.

 

While being a famous scientist, Zhang himself has developed an index – W-Index – to evaluate different contributions of co-authors in one paper. He also works to improve H-Index, a popular academic evaluation tool.

 

Sun Gaopeng, director of Elsevier China, introduced at the symposium that to become world-leading universities, Chinese institutes require a more systematic, scientific and objective process to identify and attract talents. 

 

“Being different from the traditional method, the solutions provided by Elsevier generates new outlooks and can better address the issues and satisfy the needs, from both macro and micro levels,” Sun says.

 

He shows the examples of SciVal Spotlight, a new evaluation tool soon to be released by Elsevier. The tool can help decision makers to decide which academic disciplines are potentially advantageous for the university and who are talents that can help the university/institution to quickly develop the discipline.

 

Besides evaluation, transparency is another important factor to ensure the success of One-Thousand-Talent scheme and other human resource programme, says Jia Hepeng, Editor in Chief of Science News Bi-Weekly in China.

 

Jia says that his magazine will work as a platform to consistently promote the opening and transparency of talent policies in China.

 

All the speeches are hotly discussed and the special column at the ScienceNet.cn website has received very high visits.

 

Science News Bi-Weekly will also partner Elsevier to launch the Chinese version of Scopus Young Scientist Scholarship to help identify the most promising talents in China.  

 

 

Elsevier is a world leading, multiple-media publisher of scientific, technical and health information products and services, with 7,000 employees in 73 locations around the globe. It is the publisher of more than 20,000 products and services, including journals, books, electronic products, services, databases and portals serving the global scientific, technical and medical (STM) communities. 

 

 

Science News Bi-weekly is the first professional science news magazine in China.

 

Operated under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and invested by Science Times Group, the magazine changed its style from an academic policy journal of the past 10 years to a news magazine targeting the Chinese science community in 2009. It tries to professionally interpret the newest developments in research and science policies, express scientists’ views and suggestions, and offer service contents ranging from funding application, paper publication and career development to personalized entertainment.