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Huang Firuo was once a respected scientist who studied ways to make pigs gain weight faster. He ran government-funded research projects at Huazhong Agricultural University in the central city of Wuhan. But last month 11 of his graduate students accused him of stealing the work of other academics and fabricating data. They also pressured him to fake his own research, he said. On February 6, the university announced that it had fired Mr. Huang and reinstated some of his duties.
Scientific fraud is very common in China. Bad incentives are a big part of the problem. Chinese universities generally give promotions and funding to researchers based on the quantity of their published papers, not the quality. Its result has been found. In 2017, China published more scientific papers than any other country for the first time. Since then it has retained the top position. But while some research has been cutting-edge, much has been questionable.
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The scale of the problem is difficult to measure, because fraudulent practices often go unnoticed. But when a scientific journal retracts a study, usually because of suspicion of research misconduct, the retraction is useful. China’s return rate of letters is the fourth highest in the world, according to the journal Nature (see chart). In a database of nearly 50,000 retracted studies compiled by CrossRef, an American non-profit, and Retraction Watch, a blog, about 46% are from China.
Many messed up papers are probably written for a fee by “paper mills”. These organizations often steal genuine research, changing some details. Some fakes are obvious, says Elizabeth Bisi, a microbiologist who specializes in rooting them out. For example, a Chinese paper on prostate cancer was found which claimed that more than half of the patients studied were women. Other counterfeit products seem more credible and may pollute the field of research, says Ms. Beek, reviewing work from China.
The government, which hopes to turn China into a scientific superpower, is trying to crack down on fake research. In recent years it has fined hundreds of scientists who misbehaved and barred them from public funding. In January the Ministry of Education launched a new campaign demanding that universities investigate every retracted paper written by their faculty. Many writers welcome such rigor. A researcher at a hospital in Beijing says authorities should use harsher penalties to “clean up” science’s findings.
But punishment alone won’t solve the problem, says Xu Fei of Hangzhou Dianzi University. He believes that universities should stop rewarding researchers simply for publishing lots of papers. In 2020, the government issued guidelines to this effect. Still, little has changed, Mr. Xu says. He suspects that part of the problem is that university leaders are government officials (rather than academics). So they are good at pursuing numerical goals, but bad at promoting good science, which is hard to quantify.
The example set by Mr. Huang’s graduate students is encouraging to say the least. Many Chinese people on social media have praised him for taking a stand while risking harm to their academic careers. But there is still a lot of work to be done. In an online survey published last year, more than a quarter of Chinese undergraduate medical students considered it acceptable to fabricate some data or results.
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Published: April 24, 2024, 06:45 PM IST
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