Fund punishes scientists for academic fraud

Government-funded scientists who were embroiled in an academic scandal that saw the retraction of 107 research papers by an international journal have received warnings or been banned from applying for funding.

In April, Springer, the publisher of Tumor Biology through 2016, retracted research papers by Chinese authors after discovering they had been compromised by fake peer reviews.

Of the 107 papers, 18 concerned projects funded by the central government's National Natural Science Fund, which this year has about 24.8 billion yuan ($3.72 billion).

"We have thoroughly investigated every flawed paper that received money from the foundation," Yang Wei, director of the Natural Science Foundation of China, which administers the fund, said at a news conference in Beijing on Thursday.

"We carefully re-evaluated projects applying for funds that cite scientific findings from those retracted papers," he said. "The foundation will strictly follow the regulations established by the State Council for dealing with issues regarding academic dishonesty."

This year, the foundation has received funding applications for close to 195,000 scientific projects, a record high, he said. Fifty-one of them cited findings from the retracted papers, and all of those were rejected, he said.

As of Aug 15, the foundation has approved 40,860 projects and provided about 20 billion yuan in direct funding. "The foundation works to strengthen China's science and technology foundation, to improve and encourage innovation on all levels, and to become the driving force behind China's transformation into a powerhouse of science," Yang said.

The foundation launched 32 investigations and sent out 40 enquiries to 26 institutions that were involved to fully understand the situation regarding the retracted papers, Yang said, adding that the foundation issued official warnings to about 70 scientists for their academic misconduct.

About 50 were banned from applying to the national fund for from one to seven years, depending on the severity of situation, he said.

"These numbers show that we are very serious about punishing academic misconduct and fraud," he said. "The vast majority of the experts conducting the investigations are not from the foundation, and they have judged the cases impartially."

Yang said he has talked with Springer representatives about how to prevent such abuses. He explained to them that one of the root causes of academic fraud is that sometimes shady intermediary and language-polishing agencies take advantage of scientists and distort their work.

"We hope to work further with international publishers to stop academic misconduct together," Yang said. "Severely punishing fraudulent academic behavior such as 'ghost writing' and 'ghost peer-reviewing', can effectively prevent such misconduct from happening. Our nation's academic atmosphere will improve after this incident."

zhangzhihao@chinadaily.com.cn