Last year's major events in academic probity

January: Preliminary investigations by government authorities show that He Jiankui, the scientist behind the world's first gene-edited baby, deliberately evaded oversight by forging documents to enlist volunteers for his illegal experiment and by substituting blood test results.

February: Popular actor Zhai Tianlin is stripped of a doctorate awarded by the Beijing Film Academy after investigations by the school and the Ministry of Education into plagiarism. Zhai's PhD adviser, Chen Yi, is banned from supervising doctoral students.

March: Wang Zhigang, minister of science, pledges that China will continue to improve its research environment by issuing more guidelines to curb academic misconduct and enhance ethical regulations in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and gene editing.

April: New legislative oversight of human-related scientific research and medical tests is added to the draft civil law. The new regulation requires all medical and scientific research related to human genes and embryos to adhere to strict rules, pose no threat to people's health or violate moral or ethical codes.

June: The general offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council issue a guideline on improving academic integrity and behavior. The rule emphasizes the social impact of a person's research and reduces the weight given to the number of papers published.

August: The Ministry of Science and Technology announces that it has established a national database to evaluate scientists and research projects for academic misconduct. The data is accessible to other government bodies so they can jointly supervise and uphold academic integrity.

September: The Ministry of Science and Technology issues two documents containing new definitions of a range of academic misconduct and clarifying the chain of command for handling and handing out punishments during different stages of research activity.

October: Gao Qinglei, a distinguished professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Hubei province, is accused of duplicating images in at least eight of her published papers. Gao denies the accusations, calling them "sinister slanders" that are designed to tarnish her reputation.

November: Cao Xuetao, president of Nankai University in Tianjin, is accused of image duplication in a set of papers he supervised. Cao publicly apologizes for any lapse in supervision, but says he is confident about the validity and reproducibility of the work.

December: Rao Yi, a noted neurologist and president of Capital Medical University in Beijing, accuses three of his peers of academic fraud in a letter he drafted that was later leaked. The claims prompt the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the nation's top funder of basic research, to investigate.