The Retraction Crisis Comes From China

In recent years, academia has struggled with a wide array of issues of quality and accuracy in published research. Retractions have grown exponentially with growing concerns that most published research is false, and academics live under the aegis of “publish or perish” even if that means regularly publishing errata.

But little has been said about how much of the crisis stems from research coming out of China. According to data from the website Retraction Watch, China-originated research represents 45 percent of all retractions, corrections, or concerns.

While China has the world’s largest population and ostensibly publishes more research as a result, it’s not as much as the U.S. And the number of papers found to be lacking from China easily surpasses those from any other country. Papers from China are responsible for almost four times the number of retractions and corrections than the U.S. despite the U.S. producing 50 percent more citable documents than China according to the SCImago Journal & Country Rank.

The retracted and corrected papers come from a wide variety of subjects, journals, and academic institutions, although sometimes a massive number of retractions are tied to a single journal surrounding a single conference.

In one instance, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) retracted over 1,280 papers from a single 2012 meeting because of reliability concerns. Over 96 percent of those papers were wholly or partially authored by Chinese academics. The vast number of reasons given were breach of policy with no additional information given.

Another conference from 2011 on bioinformatics had 1,036 retractions or corrections. The Arabian Journal of Geosciences had 769 retracted, almost all due to fake peer review—wherein the researchers coordinate the paper’s reviewers to be a friend, colleague, or just the author under a different email address.

The reasons for retractions also vary widely, but some of the major ones include fake peer review, data issues, unreliable results, image duplications, or the use of a paper mill—for-profit companies that churn out sometimes unreliable research for a fee.

Rather than the social sciences where p-hacking and the replication crisis have received significant attention, most retracted Chinese research topics are from the harder sciences: biology, math, computer science, and mechanical engineering.

Cancer in particular has seen its fair share of retractions with Tumor Biology holding the crown for the publication with the most retractions in 2017. Cancer-related subjects hold high ranks in the list of Chinese articles retracted including cellular biology (#1), genetics (#2), molecular biology (#11), and oncology (#12).

Issues with academic integrity have been a chronic problem in China for some time. In 2017, the Chinese government announced a crackdown on the widespread use of peer review fraud. Chinese researchers are regularly known for selling their authorship to the highest bidders on informal paper-writing markets. In China, the dictum of publish or perish is considered more extreme and a high burden on PhD students.

The country’s attempt at limiting academic fraud is hard to determine as there were 75 percent more retracted articles published in 2019 (1,411) as in 2017 (807) when the crackdown was announced.