Scandals Shake Chinese Science

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For more than a decade, the Chinese gov-ernment has been heaping money and prestige on its academic community in a bid to gain ground in a global technological race. In this scientific Wild East, an unprecedented number of researchers stand accused of cheating—from fudging résumés to fabricating data—to gain fame or plum positions. Buffeted by scandals and an urgent appeal for action from expatriate scientists, top scientific leaders now acknowledge the need for change in a system notorious for its high expectations and scant oversight. “Too many incentives have blurred the reasons for doing science in some people’s minds,” Lu Y ongxiang, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), told Science .“We need to improve our evaluation and assessment system to establish a better culture for R&D innovation.”

The central government is taking the first tentative swipes at what will amount to a Herculean task. For starters, the Ministry of Education (MOE), which funds and oversees the nation’s universities, last month issued ethics guidelines and formed a panel to police conduct in the social sciences. “Though it is difficult to ascertain the number of misconduct cases, the negative impact of these cases should not be underestimated,” says MOE spokesperson Wang Xuming. CAS, adds Lu, “will do its best to improve oversight. Monitoring by society is also needed.” Xu Guanhua, minister of science and technology, told Chinese reporters in March that “if academic corruption exists, then we will investigate every single case, thoroughly.” That pledge notwithstanding, the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), with one of the largest portfolios, has not yet revealed how it plans to crack down on misconduct.

Part of the challenge, observers say, is that science in China is acutely susceptible to influ-ence peddling. Only a small percentage of R&D funding is awarded after Western-style peer review. Success often depends more on how well

a scientist cultivates support from grant managers and politicians than on the quality of research.In a milieu of unhealthy relationships, some question whether the government has the

resolve to police the scientific community strictly. “Many leaders shield misconduct;this is a serious problem,” says Chen-lu Tsou, a biophysicist at CAS’s Institute of Biophysics.Adds Liu Jixing, a retired physicist, “Without

fundamental changes, we won’t be able to buck the trend of academic corruption.”

Running to the ministries

When the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping pronounced in late 1988 that “science and technology is the primary productive force,” it was like firing a starting gun. Since then, China has steadily ratcheted up the emphasis on R&D and innovation, setting goals such as creating 100 world-class universities in the 21st century and having science and technology contribute to 60% of the economy by 2020. The central government’s R&D appropriation has tripled in 10 years, from $3 billion in 1996 to $9 billion in 2006, with further increases planned for the next 15 years (Science , 17 March, p. 1548).The infusion of new money, critics say, accen-tuated the shortcomings of a research funding system tailored to a planned economy and driven by top-down political decisions. One exception is the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), which sponsors basic research and since its founding in 1986 has used W estern-style peer review to administer grants. But its 2006 budget, $425 million, amounts to less than 5% of the central government’s R&D spending.MOST will distribute around $1.7 billion this year, mostly for applied research at universities,CAS institutes, and occasionally, companies. The ministry relies on experts to choose and evaluate projects. “On the face of it, the process looks pretty good. But in reality, a small circle of stakeholders have already predecided where the money will go,” asserts Tang Anguo, director of East China Normal University’s Institute of Higher Education Research in Shanghai. MOST declined repeated requests for an interview.

Tang and others claim that although MOST says it relies on expert opinion in choosing which proposals to fund, grant managers can veto the advice of scientific experts, often citing political reasons for doing so. Compounding the potential for abuse, in the name of streamlining, MOST

Scandals Shake Chinese Science

A spate of misconduct cases may force China’s scientific leaders to clean house or watch their drive for a more innovative society sputter

SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT

Back to basics. Incentives have “blurred the reasons for doing science,” says academy president Lu Yongxiang.

Golden.Shanghai’s horizon reflects a growing ambition that powers China’s investment in research and technology.

“If academic corruption exists,then we will investigate every single case, thoroughly.”

—Xu Guanhua, minister of science and technology

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has slashed its in-house staff and now routinely borrows grant managers from universities, says Liu. This creates a group of scientists-cum-managers with potential conflicts of interest.MOST research managers wield significant power. Universities have long been engaged in pao bu qian jin , a pun satirizing the practice of “running to ministries to get money.” Professors’incomes are often tied to how much grant funding they bring in; they may take up to 40% as commis-sion, according to grant-management documents of several universities. Last year, MOST issued a directive forbidding the use of grant money as rewards, but it is not clear whether it will stop the linkage of salaries to grants.

In return for their largess, managers demand quick results to demonstrate zheng ji , or admin-istrative achievements, to higher-ups. “If you don’t give them results in 3 to 5 years, your project is terminated,” grumbles Wang Yiqiu, a former vice president of Beijing University. And results are often measured in numbers. Tallies of citation-indexed papers, by individual and by institution, have become a national obsession.Nanjing University was the first to use the num-ber of papers published in journals covered by the Science Citation Index (SCI) to evaluate faculty members in the early 1980s, and the practice has spread widely. (The Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China publishes annual statistics ranking universities by the number of papers and by citation rates.)To earn a master’s degree, students at many uni-versities must be first author of at least one SCI

paper, and Ph.D. students need two. Many insti-tutions hand out cash rewards—hundreds of dollars, scaled by the journal’s reputation—for publishing an SCI paper (Science , 23 February 2001, p. 1477). The combination of pressure and incentives has nurtured an environment

that’s rife with simultaneous or serial duplicate manuscript submissions, self-plagiarized cookie-cutter papers, individual and institu-tional honorary authorship, and outright plagia-rism, says Ouyang Zhongcan, director of CAS’s Institute of Theoretical Physics.

Not surprisingly, quality suffers. According to CAS, although China ranked ninth in the world in 2004 in the total number of science and technology publications, it ranked only

124th in terms of the average num-ber of citations per paper. Former CAS president Zhou Guangzhao has long criticized an overempha-sis on SCI papers, arguing that it discourages long-term or risky work. The problem, says Ouyang,is that no one seems to be listening to Zhou.

Higher political attention to a lab or a project raises the likelihood of securing ample funding. For example, in early 2000, biologist Cheng Jing gave a talk to the State Council, China’s cabinet, about the importance and applications of biochips, catching the interest of then–Prime Minister Zhu Rongji.The following September, Cheng founded a company, Capital

Biochip Corp., with more than $30 million from the State Devel-opment Planning Commission (Science , 15 December 2000,

p. 2061). Ministries also chipped in non-peer-reviewed support, validating a popular saying among Chinese scientists: “Big grants,no review; small grants, big review.”

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Crime Scene Investigation:

How to Handle Misconduct

Chinese scientists aren’t the only ones who may find misconduct investigations a murky business (see main text): Confusion is the norm in much of the world, according to experts who are trying to raise global standards.

Most countries have taken an “ad hoc approach” to probing mis-conduct allegations, says Chris Pascal, director of the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), the overseer of investigations at biomedical labs and other facilities funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A common experience, he says, is that officials “get an allegation and then try to figure out how to deal with it.” Without guidelines, “you don’t know what to do first, and you may end up violating legal norms.” The mistakes that often follow make it hard to reach a fair decision.

To help dispel some of the fog, Pascal and ORI consultant Nicholas Steneck, a historian at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, are lead-ing a global effort to foster clear standards of conduct and encourage nations to adopt coherent policies. It’s critical, Steneck says, to create transparent systems and educate scientists and their bosses so that everyone understands where the community should draw the line. This week, ORI and the European Science Foundation (ESF)—a nongovern-mental organization—announced that they will get the international ball rolling by cosponsoring the first “World Conference on Research Integrity,” scheduled for September 2007 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Interest in the project is surging, Pascal says, because of publicity over the South Korean stem cell research fraud, as well as recent news of misconduct allegations in China (Science , 19 May, p. 987), Japan (Science , 3 February,p. 595), and Norway (Science , 27 January, p. 448). “People used to fall asleep when I talked about educating scientists” on research integrity, Steneck says.Now they’re paying attention—and, critically, offering support. ESF adviser Anthony Mayer says the Lisbon conference got a boost from joining a new initiative proposed by Japan to compare national policies around the world,supported by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The European Union and others are on board.

Models of how to deal with scientific misconduct come in all shapes and sizes, Mayer says. One approach is to leave decisions to employers. The United States and the United Kingdom, for example, rely primarily on uni-versities and research institutions for the first level of misconduct review,but the United States also has a national definition of misconduct and clear procedures for investigations, independent oversight, and appeals. The U.K. in March created a national Research Integrity Office that intends to establish guidelines and give advice. Elsewhere in Europe, Denmark has what may be the most centralized system, in which a judge oversees inquiries in all fields of science; other countries follow a variety of https://www.wendangku.net/doc/af11736615.html,anizers of the Lisbon conference say they are loath to create international rules. “We don’t want people filling out more forms on the lab bench,” says Mayer. One goal of the confab, he says, is to get people talking about practices that may spur cheating—such as using postdocs as “research slaves” or setting rigid productivity targets. That message is likely to resonate with rank-and-file scientists.–ELIOT

MARSHALL

No more Mr. Nice Guy. Chinese scientific leaders tolerate misconduct—and that’s a “serious problem,” says biophysicist Chen-lu Tsou.

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The advantage of showing off political con-nections was not lost on another researcher, Chen Jin, who claimed to have designed China’s first homegrown digital signal processor chips. The former dean of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) had a picture hanging outside his office of Prime Minister W en Jiabao on a visit when Chen’s star was rising. Other photos on the lab’s W eb site trumpeted visits of a former vice premier, a for-mer MOE minister, a current vice minister of MOST , and a vice mayor of Shanghai. Chen was fired last month, after an inquiry concluded that his chips were faked (Science , 19 May, p. 987).The chip scandal illustrates many shortcom-ings of the system. When questions surfaced about the chips’authenticity, SJTU, fearing a blow to its own reputation, asked higher authorities to step in,sources close to the investigation told Science .They say two inquiries were carried out: first by the Shanghai government, then by MOST. The first investigation, they say, was inconclusive partly because city officials were looking for but did not receive clear instructions from the central govern-ment on whether to punish or spare Chen. As the Chinese media continued to scrutinize the case, the main sponsor of the research, MOST , launched a second inquiry that laid the blame at Chen’s feet.Some question whether the experts who eval-uated Chen’s inventions—and lauded the design as a “landmark” in China’s chip-development history at the 2003 unveiling—should also bear responsibility. Politicians basked in Chen’s glory when he was on the rise: Shanghai officials had organized news conferences to announce his inventions. And SJTU President Xie Shengwu eagerly took dignitaries on tours of Chen’s lab.All of them are silent now. “Chen may not be as culpable as he is made out to be; he may very well

achievements in his résumé (Science , 14 April,p. 193). A month later, Sichuan University in Chengdu absolved biophysicist Qiu Xiaoqing of a data-falsification charge (Science ,28 April,p. 511), although questions about the research persist. Recently aired allegations against other scientists are unresolved.

Concerned by the flurry of allegations and the government’s reluctance to mount inquiries,120 Chinese scientists, most of whom are based in the United States, called on MOST , MOE, CAS,and NSFC in a letter last month to “establish a fair,open and formal system for dealing with allega-tions of scientific misconduct and other issues related to integrity of research.” They urged the institutions not to leave the pursuit of misconduct cases to the media (Science , 19 May, p. 987).The letter unleashed a torrent of frustration and anger. A handful of prominent voices wel-comed it. The letter “raises a very good issue,”

says Tsou. Others claim that the authors’prescription—a new system for addressing misconduct allegations—is na?ve. Disciplinary rules exist, they say; the problem is that the rules are rarely applied. (An exception is NSFC. It established specific rules in 2005 for investigat-ing alleged fraud in grant proposals and has prosecuted about three dozen cases so far.Punishment ranges up to indefinite debarment.)Anonymous postings on New Threads, a popular Chinese Web site for airing misconduct allega-tions, accused the authors of being out of touch with realities in their homeland.

Supporters of New Threads argue that offi-cial institutions can’t do the job, so vigilante justice is needed. Letter drafter Xin-Y uan Fu, an immunologist at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, believes that the Web site’s popularity stems from the lack of an inde-pendent press in China. “People do not trust offi-cial media and look for alternative sources,” he says. Many allegations posted are anonymous,and some are unfounded. Fu reiterates the open letter’s recommendation that China establish a “rule of law” to safeguard research integrity.Despite the mixed reaction, the open letter has reignited a debate about whether China’s research system is in need of an overhaul. People may argue over whether the letter’s suggestions can solve the problem of scientific misconduct,but they should keep in mind the common goal of a healthy academic environment, says Yi Rao,a neurobiologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and a letter signatory. A “proper mechanism for handling misconduct allegations is a part of that environment,” he says. “Officials need to show that they are more interested in building research infrastructure than controlling funds.”

The government seems to be coming around to that message. T wo days after the open letter,MOE issued guidelines on “strengthening aca-demic ethics.” And late last month, it announced the formation of a committee on discipline in the social sciences; in March, more than 100 social scientists had signed an open letter calling on colleagues to behave themselves and urging the government to establish rules for combating “academic misconduct and corruption” in their field. The panel will formulate rules for univer-sities on how to handle allegations.

It’s unclear whether new rules will produce the desired results. As He Zuoxiu, a CAS physi-cist, notes, “the handling of misconduct cases is a matter of policy, not of mechanism”—and to date, the government has shown little appetite for cracking down. But the time may be ripe for a change. In March, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao called on the coun-try to establish a “socialist outlook on honor and dishonor” by learning “eight honors and eight shames.” One of the honors is honesty.

–HAO XIN

With reporting by Gong Yidong of China Features in Beijing.

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