Important genetic research done in China often fails to reach the international scientific community, according to a study published in the open access journal PLoS Medicine.
Zhenglun Pan, of Shandong Provincial Hospital, China, and a multinational team of colleagues investigated studies that had been done on thirteen "gene-disease associations" (i.e., links between specific genes and certain diseases).
They first looked at the studies on these 13 gene-disease associations that were published in English language journals and that were logged into an international database of medical research called PubMed. They then searched a Chinese database for additional studies on these same 13 topics.
In the Chinese database, the researchers identified 161 Chinese studies on 12 of these gene-disease associations. Only 20 of these 161 studies were indexed in PubMed.
The researchers found important differences between Chinese and non-Chinese studies. For example, with one exception the first Chinese study appeared with a time lag (2–21 years) after the first non-Chinese study on the topic. The Chinese studies also showed significantly more prominent genetic effects than the non-Chinese studies. This was probably due to bias favoring the dissemination of impressive results, and this bias seemed to operate also beyond the Chinese literature.