Punishments need to be much tougher

In recent years, China has paid more attention to improving research integrity and optimizing our institutions and mechanisms for dealing with related issues.

The purpose of upholding research integrity is not to police scientists, but to efficiently generate accurate and reliable knowledge that can be used to benefit society. After all, the skyscraper of science is built on the foundations of sound knowledge. If the knowledge is false, then the whole building could fall apart.

Thus, research integrity plays a pivotal role in quality control by ensuring that research work is done properly and the knowledge produced is of high quality. Moreover, research integrity is a complex issue that mixes social morality, scientific institutions, public policy, governance and other factors, so it deserves deeper examination.

For example, much scientific research requires government funding and support. Therefore, research integrity has become a branch of public management, and the government has an incentive to ensure a high degree of integrity so money is spent well and the research is conducted efficiently.

Definitions of academic misconduct differ widely from country to country, but some have argued that in addition to the "three cardinal sins"－plagiarism, fabrication and falsification－actions that seriously deviate from the common consensus should also be regarded as misconduct.

For example, in Denmark, the illegal transfer of authorship, inappropriate applications for funding and selectively disclosing or hiding research results are considered to be academic misconduct. In Australia, violations of bioethics in research are now starting to be listed as academic misconduct.

In China, the development of research integrity faces new challenges; one of them is the proliferation of third-party paid services in the research process, such as ghostwriting, translating and faking peer reviews. The mass retractions of Chinese scientific papers in 2015 and 2017 were largely due to this factor.

Another issue is that the punishments are mostly administrative penalties, such as revoking funding and positions.

There are no relevant laws or criminal charges to tackle those who violate academic integrity, so the cost of violation remains low.

What we should do is let the scientific community become the key judge and auditor of academic research, and change the status quo of overemphasizing tangible and quantitative indicators, such as the number of titles or published works, for the evaluation and promotion of scientists.

Second, the government should play a bigger role in establishing a strict legal and regulatory system to combat academic misconduct. It doesn't need to get directly involved in reviewing academic work, but it should supervise the scientific community and optimize the public governance system related to research integrity.

Li Zhengfeng spoke with Zhang Zhihao.