In recent years, the falsification of papers by Chinese researchers and the gradual industrialization of the act have sparked close attention from Western academia. The British journal Nature published a feature article on the 23rd, revealing the industrialized paper “falsification” problem faced by the publishing industry, mentioning that the number of fake papers from Chinese hospitals has increased dramatically by about 50 times in the past 20 years.
The Wall Street Journal shocked the academic and publishing community last July when it revealed that more than 100 papers by researchers at Chinese hospitals and medical schools had been falsified and mass-produced, and the situation continues to unfold.
The vast Chinese paper-fixing industry
In an article published Tuesday in the British journal Nature, independent investigators and journals have identified more than 1,000 academic articles that may have been linked to “paper mills” since January 2020. According to the article, 370 retracted submissions from China were alleged to have come from “paper mills”; 45 were listed as concerns. In addition, some of the 197 retracted papers had the problem of identical images.
Meanwhile, three journals of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) withdrew 70 papers written by researchers from Chinese hospitals in January, issuing a statement describing the society as a victim of a “systematic industry of paper fraud.
How can you tell when a paper is being mass-produced?
The Nature report mentions that the “industrialized” fake papers appear to have been generated using a generic template, and while the words and images in the articles are fine-tuned, they share similar characteristics, including images of protein immunoblots (Western Blot) with the same background and suspiciously smooth contours; different titles derived from the same subject; and different experiments with the same title. different titles derived from the same topic; bars from different experiments but with the same layout, etc. However, these graphs, which serve as markers for fake papers, are only apparent when they are contrasted.
Investigators believe that the industrialized state of paper falsification that has been uncovered is probably only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the medical field, the same problem exists in the computer, engineering, humanities and social sciences.
Chinese doctors are the main “customers” of “thesis factories”
In 2017, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology launched an investigation into the retraction of 107 peer-reviewed papers by Chinese authors in the journal Tumor Biology, finding that “12 of them were purchased from third-party institutions.”
Chinese physicians and researchers often need to publish papers in exchange for promotions, making them one of the main targets of “paper mills.
The journal Nature quoted two Chinese researchers as lamenting that the poor publishing environment in China has led to a situation where few people believe or cite papers written by Chinese scientists, and that the “plague” has even begun to corrupt foreign medical journals, seriously affecting China’s image internationally.
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