Jining First People’s Hospital, based in eastern China’s Shandong province, was at the center of a scientific scandal in late 2021. An internal investigation led to sanctions for 35 researchers from various departments at the institution—mostly young doctors—who published studies containing fraudulent data and images produced by paper mills (illegal services that produce fake articles for a fee). The authors were banned from receiving research funding for periods ranging from five to six years. The episode became public knowledge amid a major effort by the Chinese government to combat the recent rise of misconduct in academia.
The case at the hospital was not an isolated example in the country, as shown in a report published in the journal Nature in February, which identified the scientific institutions worldwide with the highest proportion of retracted articles, meaning articles that were withdrawn after being published due to errors or signs of plagiarism or fraud. Of the 10 institutions with the highest percentage of retracted papers from their total scientific output, seven were Chinese hospitals or medical schools. Jining First People’s Hospital ranked first on the list, with more than 100 retractions between 2014 and 2024, equating to 5% of all papers published by its researchers in the period. Following closely behind were institutions such as Cangzhou Central Hospital in Hebei province, Huaihe Hospital at Henan University in Henan, and Weifang People’s Hospital in Shandong, each with 4% of their articles retracted.
Purchasing fake articles has become commonplace at Chinese hospitals and medical schools as a way of achieving the ambitious professional targets set for doctors and professors. The problem is only worsened by intense competition between researchers and lax supervision by institutions. “These doctors were under pressure because they were required to publish papers to get jobs or earn promotions,” microbiologist Elisabeth Bik told Nature. Bik, an expert in scientific fraud, was one of the first to point out the problem after analyzing cases of image manipulation.
Nature compiled data on the institutions with the most retracted articles using three different tools created by companies in the USA and the UK: Argos, made by Scitility; Signals, by Research Signals; and Dimensions Author Check, by Digital Science. Although methodological differences mean they do not always produce the same results, all three make use of information from the Retraction Watch website’s database, which contains records on more than 57,000 retractions worldwide.
China was the country that stood out the most. Six out of every ten articles retracted between 2014 and 2024 were written by authors from Chinese institutions and 0.3% of the country’s literature from the period was retracted—three times more than the global average. In terms of the absolute number of papers retracted, large institutions had the greatest impact, such as Jilin University in Changchun province (484 papers retracted in 10 years, according to the Signals tool), and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, known for producing a renowned international university ranking (with 306 retractions according to Signals).
Other countries that featured heavily included Saudi Arabia, India, Iraq, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. Researchers at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had 322 papers retracted between 2020 and 2024, according to Signals. The number peaked at 94 in 2022, most retracted due to peer-review manipulation and the use of paper mills—many contained adulterated images and in some cases, names were added to the author list throughout the review process, suggesting authorship was being sold. King AbdulAziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, also had 195 retractions in the first four years of this decade. The institution drew attention due to an episode at its School of Pharmacy: the school’s dean of research, Nabil Alhakamy, had 20 articles retracted for copying images and content from his previous work.
Saudi universities were also involved in an ethics scandal that instead of resulting in retractions, led to many of their researchers being removed from the list of highly cited scientists published by Clarivate Analytics. The move came after it was discovered that universities in the country were paying foreign scientists who published a lot of articles to name their primary place of work as Saudi Arabia, when in reality they only spent a few weeks there every year. The scam was devised to improve the position of Saudi institutions in international university rankings.
Institutions in India, such as Saveetha University in Chennai and the SRM Institute of Science and Technology in Kattankulathur, also had a high number of articles retracted between 2020 and 2024, with 168 and 199 retractions respectively. Some of those from Saveetha were short communications, which have a maximum of 3,000 words and are used to quickly share an idea or the conclusion of a scientific study. In the journal Neurosurgical Review alone, 87 manuscripts submitted by authors from the Indian institution were retracted after evidence emerged that they had been written by AI software, such as ChatGPT. The KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology in Coimbatore, India, had more than 100 articles retracted after IOP Publishing decided to make 350 retractions from two volumes of conference proceedings for which the peer-review process was compromised.
The Nature report urges caution when analyzing its findings and warns that institutions may have experienced many retractions due to the efforts of governments, universities, journals, and certain disciplines to investigate cases of misconduct. An absence of retractions in some disciplines or institutions may simply mean there was less willingness to investigate potential misconduct, said Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, France, who created tools to detect problematic papers.
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