Chinese university chief under investigation after research called into question
- Nankai University President Cao Xuetao defends papers he supervised after an investigator questions graph results
- Chinese Academy of Engineering starts investigation into claims made on PubPeer website
The Chinese Academy of Engineering is investigating the president of a leading university over claims that academic papers he supervised may have questionable data.
Cao Xuetao, the president of Nankai University in Tianjin, insisted that he was “confident in the validity and strength of the scientific conclusions” after the accusations were made on PubPeer, a US website that allows users to review scientific research.
Last Thursday, Elisabeth Bik, a former microbiologist who has spent the last five years identifying image manipulation in research, posted about apparently duplicated graph results from a paper Cao supervised in 2008 when he was vice-president of The Second Military Medical University.
“Each panel with the measurement of cells should have a constellation of dots but some panels appear to have the same set of dots and that is not expected in a biology experiment,” Bik wrote.
The discovery led to similar findings in more than 50 papers Cao supervised when he was with The Second Military Medical University and National Key Laboratory of Medical Immunology with Zhejiang University between 2003 and last year.