The National Natural Science Foundation of China, an agency that funds basic research in the country, published an extensive report on its website outlining the results of 15 investigations into researchers and universities that committed ethical violations, including plagiarism, image manipulation, and the sale of authorship of scientific articles. The institution also reported on the sanctions it imposed on 26 individuals found guilty of misconduct. Most were banned from submitting new research proposals to the agency or reviewing the proposals of others for periods of 3 to 7 years, but there were also cases where funding was revoked, including some required to return funds already disbursed, and even expulsion from the Chinese research system.
There were several cases of plagiarism and doctored images in published papers. One example is Zekuan Xu of Nanjing Medical University, Jiangsu. He has been banned from applying for funding for three years after publishing a dozen articles with identical images, each time used to represent different results. One of the key findings of the report was the extent of integrity problems at Inner Mongolia University for Nationalities in the north of the country, which was determined negligent in monitoring and investigating episodes of misconduct among its researchers. Five professors from the institution were named, accused of ethical violations in the production of a dozen scientific articles.
The most serious case was pharmacologist Wei Chengxi, who was permanently banned from receiving public funding for research, while two projects he led that were already funded by the agency were canceled. The researcher was found to have committed several types of fraud, including purchasing experimental data to use in his papers, falsifying data, and improper attribution of authorship. The investigation also identified that he asked for a reimbursement for the money he used to buy the experimental data, claiming that he had spent it on reagents.
Kebin Chen and Lei Chen, both doctors at hospitals in Shandong province, eastern China, were punished for purchasing authorship of scientific articles and entrusting third parties to submit their work to journals—something typical of paper mills (illegal services that produce fake articles for paying customers). Cardiology student Xu-He Gong of Capital Medical University, Beijing, bought data and outsourced research experiments to a private company, according to the investigation. He will now have to return the funding provided by the agency and will not be able to submit new funding applications until 2029.
The story above was published with the title “Chinese government punishes 26 researchers for misconduct and shares details of cases in online report” in issue 351 of May/2025.
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