Tsinghua University says it revoked PhD after blog reveals plagiarism and misconduct
- University made the decision a year ago but only announced it after ‘image manipulation, duplication and deceptive authorship’ was exposed in report
- Student’s supervisor also lost his position at the Shenzhen school
Tsinghua University has announced, a year after it made the decision, that it revoked a doctorate because of data manipulation and other misconduct by a student whose papers were retracted from international journals.
The prestigious university in Beijing said in a statement on Sunday that Ye Xiaoxin had been stripped of his doctorate after his misconduct was uncovered.
In some papers, Ye – whose doctorate was from the university’s Graduate School at Shenzhen in 2015 – was found to have “self-plagiarised, duplicated images and fabricated results”, the statement said, after an influential blog revealed that 11 papers he authored had been retracted.
The university said that Ye – who began the doctoral programme in materials science and engineering in 2010 – had been the subject of an internal investigation and that his misconduct had been discovered in January last year.
It cancelled his doctorate three months later, a move that was announced within the university.
Five months on, his supervisor, Tang Guoyi, could no longer take on postgraduate students and lost his position as deputy head of the new materials department because of dereliction of duty, the university said. Tang continued to work for the university after the penalties were announced but has now retired.
The statement followed allegations on Friday by Retraction Watch – which reports on scientific papers being retracted – that a group of materials scientists in China had 11 papers retracted from journals for misconduct including “image manipulation, duplication and deceptive authorship”.