Chinese education authorities are reviewing research misconduct under pressure from massive retractions from international journals. One college in northern China recently publicized a list with hundreds of unscrupulous domestic journals.
According to Chinese state media, The Paper’s report on April 4, the Shanxi Institute of Engineering and Technology’s education department has cataloged more than 400 “misconduct journals” as “unrecognized” for title evaluation for their “reckless disregard for academic quality” and “chaotic management.”
Those journals span provinces and cities and pertain to the academic journals of Yangtze University, Changchun University of Science and Technology, and Harbin Normal University, among others.
This is part of a self-review campaign among tertiary institutions and universities that echoes an instruction from the Ministry of Education, which set a deadline of Feb. 15 for them to submit a list of retracted papers from Chinese and English journals from the past three years. They need to clarify why the paper was retracted and investigate the cases involved.
Since the end of last year, education authorities in multiple provinces, such as Henan Shaanxi, Hebei, and Fujian, have issued notices to publicize all their retractions and launch investigations into misconduct cases. Several dozen universities, including Ningbo University, Hangzhou Normal University, and the Chengdu University of Information Engineering, have been reportedly underway to “clear up papers with academic misconduct problems” from 2018 onwards.
Nature, a London-based scientific journal focused on peer-reviewed research from various academic disciplines, said that according to its analysis, international journals have retracted more than 17,000 academic papers involving Chinese co-authors since 2021, the most of any country.
In addition to plagiarism and various forms of academic misconduct, anything suspected of being involved in trampling human rights is also grounds for retraction.
The report said those papers are based on DNA samples collected from Tibetans and Uyghurs who had not given their consent, and several co-authors were linked to Chinese public security authorities.
Thousands of Retractions
In 2023, Hindawi, a subsidiary of Wiley, a U.S.-based multinational publishing company, retracted more than 9,600 papers, of which more than 8,200 had co-authors in China.Notably, in the Early Warning List of International Journals by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Science Library (CAS Library) released in 2020, the initial stage of the COVID-19 outbreak, the medical field had the highest number of retractions.
Wang Jingzhou, an editor of the Journal of Jinan University in Guangzhou, published his findings from the retraction watchdog database that as of July 31, 2021, a total of 526 papers labeled as “paper mills” on 54 journals of 20 international publishers, has been withdrawn, all with Chinese authors in the byline, and most of them were from hospitals in China, especially hospitals affiliated with universities.
