A study in ethics: the Chinese science detectives hard on the trail of academic misconduct
- The growing industry of ‘scientific sleuthing’ is helping to keep academics ethical amid China’s push for more domestic science publishing
Wu Guangheng had some good news: Wiley, a US academic publishing company, was launching an investigation into one of its journals after it had been flagged by Wu’s team over suspected misconduct.
In the past, this kind of academic detective job was mainly done in the West. Now, with funding from the Chinese government, new players such as Wu have stepped into the role, investigating not only Chinese researchers, but also those from other countries suspected of wrongdoing.
Just last month, the team received a tip-off via their social media account to look into Professor M. Santosh, a geologist at the school of earth sciences and resources at the China University of Geosciences, Beijing (CUGB).
Wu said Santosh’s high productivity attracted their attention because usually a scientist, even one with a large team, could only publish about 10 papers a year, while Santosh had already published more than 60 papers since the start of 2024.
This was not the first time someone had raised concerns about Santosh, and Wu and his colleagues decided to dig into it.
They finally established that since 2020, more than 65 per cent of Santosh’s publications in four journals – all run by Chinese research institutions – involved an “author-editor conflict”.