As we all know, in recent years, China has taken strong measures and spent a lot of money to introduce relevant scientific and technological talents from abroad. These talents mainly enter universities and national research institutes. The state and units give these "talents" extraordinary high treatment (including favorable living treatment and high research start-up funds) during the employment period, hoping that they can contribute to the cultivation of urgently needed innovative talents and the output of high-level scientific and technological achievements.

At present, academic papers are widely used as an important indicator in the evaluation of various talents in many units in China. Sometimes academic background is also considered, while comprehensive examination of the applicant's academic and academic experience is often ignored, which reflects the applicant's academic potential. The simple measures of academic paper evaluation are mainly based on: the number of papers, journal impact factors (reflected by partition) and the number of citations, especially the former two, which is called "only the number of papers evaluation". This "paper only quantitative evaluation" sometimes leads to a small number of talents relying on a "special paper", such as the top journal paper, or "highly cited paper" to become "talents". We often say that this kind of talent selection phenomenon is "one paper makes the world". Facts have proved that some of these talents "disappear" in the academic circles after a few years, and have not made much contribution in science. Of course, if the gold content of such a paper is very high, for example, for basic academic papers, it has established the academic status of scholars in the international academic community, and applied papers have solved the important "neck sticking technology" of a certain industry (it is said that such achievements should reflect the value through patent transfer), even one such paper should be recognized.

When I speak on relevant occasions, I often take Gao Shan academician and Prof. Wu Xincai of China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) in their early years as models for the study of Dingtian (basic) and didi (application). Academician Gao Shan published few papers. His representative papers creatively expounded "the chemical composition of the crust of the eastern continent of China" and put forward the original viewpoint of the chemical layered structure of the lower crust of the eastern continent of China, thus establishing his influence and academic status in the International Geochemical community; Professor Wu Xincai's achievements in GIS application technology have established his leading position in the field of GIS in China.

At present, the widely used method of "only the number of papers" in talent evaluation has spawned a large number of academic papers in China, which has contributed to the achievement that the number of papers in China ranks first in the world. According to media reports, in 2019, China ranked first in the world with 684048 papers, while the United States ranked second with 678197 papers. I have no intention to deny the role of the number of papers in the achievement of China's scientific and technological power. This is because the achievement of such a large number of academic papers is undoubtedly the crystallization of the hard work and hard sweat of the national science and technology practitioners, and the record of academic papers is also the embodiment of the scientific influence of scholars. In the discussion of "the relationship between the quantity and quality of papers", we often say that without quantity, there will be no quality. This means that if our academic achievements are not supported by a certain number of papers, high-level scientific and technological achievements may become castles in the air. I often say that scientific research needs to be accumulated step by step. In particular, we should not expect to produce some major original achievements in a short period of time that are "unprecedented and never to come" and "startling the world and weeping ghosts". The accumulation of scientific research experience and achievements needs basic time. I once said in related articles that as long as it's not falsifying data, plagiarizing other people's achievements and other academic misconduct papers, I don't agree with the idea of junk papers. The scientific data provided by some "case achievement papers" (especially in the field of Geoscience) is of great significance for peers to produce important original scientific and technological achievements.

However, we must clearly realize that if an academic institution only pays attention to "paper only quantity evaluation" as a scientific evaluation standard for a long time, it will bring great hidden danger to the long-term sustainable development of these academic institutions: first of all, "paper only quantity evaluation" does not conform to the essence and connotation of talent evaluation. Comprehensive evaluation of the "quality" of a young talent is a complex matter, which can not be completed by simply "counting papers", which is not conducive to the development of some well-established "potential stock talents". Secondly, "only the number of papers evaluation" is neither scientific nor reasonable. For example, top journals and highly cited papers are often closely related to research fields. For example, nature and science do not publish papers on basic mathematics, and life science and materials science are the hot fields for the two journals to publish papers. Most of the high cited papers in Geosciences focus on traditional geology and global change, but few on geophysics.

In addition, some institutions only recognize the contribution of the first author when judging talents, which is not conducive to cooperative scientific research and team development. One of my doctoral candidates has published 5 international professional mainstream journal papers related to his doctoral dissertation. Considering the subsequent development of the students, all of them are the first authors of these papers, and I only acted as the corresponding author of two of them. In fact, the ideas of the students' thesis achievements are all from the National Natural Science Foundation project I presided over, and he was not enrolled when the project was approved. On the contrary, if the tutor is the first author and the students undertake a large number of thesis achievements, they will be arranged to be the corresponding author of the thesis. According to the practice of only recognizing the contribution of the first author, it is strange that students and I can not participate in the sharing of major achievements in both cases. This is bound to cause disharmonious relationship between teachers and students, and even teachers and students turn against each other, which is not uncommon in China. Therefore, the "only quantitative evaluation of papers" will aggravate the utilitarian and impetuous trend of thought in the domestic academic circles, and make the fragile academic ecology worse, which should arouse the attention of academic institutions. The document of "breaking the five only" issued by the relevant departments of the state has been published for a long time. Without the positive response and implementation of the vast number of grassroots academic institutions, "breaking the five only" will eventually become empty talk, and the measure of "only evaluating the number of papers" will not achieve our status as a powerful country in science and technology.