486 face punishment for links to China’s fake research paper scandal

More than 480 Chinese doctors and academics associated with published research papers that were later deemed to be fraudulent will be punished for damaging the country’s “international reputation”, the government said on Thursday.

The announcement came after major US academic publishing house Springer in April retracted 107 papers by Chinese authors that had been published in the journal Tumor Biology. After publication, the company discovered that most of the peer reviews were fake, having been written either by publishing agents or by the authors themselves under assumed names.

He Defang, director of the policy, regulation and supervision division at the Ministry of Science and Technology, told a press conference in Beijing on Thursday afternoon that an official investigation had identified 521 people, most of them hospital doctors, as having links to the scandal.

Of the total, 486 would face punishment, 24 would be put on a watch list due to a lack of clear evidence, while 11 were completely cleared as their papers had been accidentally retracted by the publisher and were not linked to the fraud, He was quoted as saying in a statement on the ministry’s website.

Of the people facing punishment, “102 should take most of the responsibility [and] 70 should take secondary responsibility”, the statement said.