Cancer Letters

Cancer Letters

Volume 464, 1 November 2019, Pages 1-4
Cancer Letters

Commentaries
Keeping a clean research environment: Addressing research misconduct and improving scientific integrity in China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.canlet.2019.08.006Get rights and content

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Scientific integrity

While ranking as the largest producer of publications in 2018 [3], China has been facing serious challenges on scientific integrity in the meantime. This misconduct includes problems with publications, grant applications, and other ethical issues.

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    Misconduct in publications

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      Data manipulation: Authors have used image processing software to manipulate the data or results of their studies.

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      Inappropriate authorship: Academically renowned scientists have been listed as co-authors, despite contributing

What has the Chinese government done to improve scientific integrity?

China is currently facing serious challenges in scientific integrity. Apparently, the current regulations cannot effectively clamp down on academic fraud. In response to this situation, official Chinese institutions are making joint efforts to improve the integrity of research and reduce scientific misconduct and fraud.

  • 1.

    Declaration of “Five No's for Publication”

In November 2015, the China Association for Science and Technology, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, National

What has the NSFC done to strengthen the scientific integrity?

Basic research is crucial to national science and technology development. NSFC, as China's largest basic research funder, always provides scientists with high-tech research support. Based on its importance and superiority, many institutions in China evaluate their faculties' academic performance by identifying their ability to get NSFC grants. Therefore, researchers in China are under tremendous pressure to obtain NSFC funding, and some of them have taken advantage of the application system to

Perspective

Chinese government agencies, including the NSFC, have essentially realized the upgrade of scientific research integrity management modes through great effort, specifically reflected in several changes including overall environmental planning to specific domain governance, from separation to synergy, combining social science with natural science, from high-level design to national participation, from separate punishment to joint punishment, from passively accepting cases to active investigation

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

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