Thursday, October 07, 2010

Is Scientific Misconduct Rampant in China?


NYTimes and The Economist have now joined a long line of news outlets shining a harsh spotlight on too many Chinese academics and researchers straying from the straight path. That some of these outlets are Chinese gives us the impression that this is a real problem, and not something cooked up by shrill westerners who are too jealous / scared of China's ascent in science.

Here's a partial list of stuff that I have seen in the past year or so:

  1. October 2010: NYTimes: Rampant Fraud Threat to China’s Brisk Ascent.

  2. October 2010: The Economist: Scientists behaving badly; Recent events show China needs to clean up its scientific act.

  3. June 2010: China Daily: Academic corruption undermining higher education: Yau Shing-tung.

  4. April 2010: University World News: CHINA: Universities fail to tackle plagiarism.

  5. April 2010: Boston Globe: In China, academic cheating is rampant; Some say practice harmful to nation.

  6. March 2010: University World News: CHINA: Professor sacked for academic plagiarism

  7. July 2009: China View: Nearly half of China's science workers think academic cheating is "common".

2 Comments:

  1. Ankur Kulkarni said...

    #3 quite shocking. The Yau in the title is the same Yau from the New Yorker article about Perelman.

  2. ktwop said...

    China is probably worse off than India. But I note that there a few crusading journalists in China trying to expose the many frauds.
    I wonder if we have any journalists in India comparable to Fang Xuanchang and Fang Shimin.
    See http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/do-plagiarism-fraud-and-retractions-make-it-more-difficult-trust-research-from-china/#more-496