Tsinghua admits revoking PhD, after misconduct reported

One of China’s top institutions – Tsinghua University – has made an unusual public announcement that it revoked the PhD of one of its students, Ye Xiaoxin, over research misconduct in almost a dozen papers he authored.

His thesis supervisor was also sanctioned by the university for negligence.

Ye, who received his doctorate in 2015 from Tsinghua University Graduate School’s Shenzhen branch had his doctorate revoked in 2017, almost two years after he received it, but the announcement was only made on 19 October this year after retractions of his papers were reported by the Retraction Watch website.

Tsinghua University admitted Ye was found to have “self-plagiarised, duplicated images and fabricated results”. It said in a statement last week that “Tsinghua University holds a zero-tolerance attitude towards academic misconduct”, and added that the university “will further strengthen its academic integrity to prevent such incidents from happening again”.

The statement comes as China is changing the rules on investigations into academic misconduct. While it was previously the responsibility of individual universities to investigate and rule on such cases, it will now come under the remit of the Ministry of Science and Technology, who will also list cases of misconduct on a national database which is still being set up.

The new rules were outlined in May this year by China’s State Council as previous rules have proved ineffective and were rarely applied by universities.

The new rules state that institutions could have their funding revoked if they protect researchers who perpetrate serious research misconduct.

Universities in China have come under increased scrutiny in recent years, and Tsinghua’s public admission is designed to show that it has not been lenient in this case, analysts said.

Tsinghua said Tang Guoyi, Ye's supervisor at the university, had received a report in March 2016 on possible academic problems in Ye’s papers and immediately organised a comprehensive review of the 16 papers published by Ye as first author.

In June 2017, Tang – whose name also appeared on 11 of the retracted papers reported by Retraction Watch – was prevented from recruiting postgraduate students at Tsinghua and lost his position as deputy head of the department of new materials, the university said. He continued to teach at the university but has now retired.

Retraction Watch reported that the papers from the group at Tsinghua “appeared in a variety of materials journals and date back to 2014. The most recent publications arrived in 2016.”

A retraction statement from Materials Science and Engineering: C, an Elsevier title that published a paper by Ye, said: “One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Reuse of any data should be appropriately cited. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process.”

Evidence of multiple publication was put forward by three academics from the University of Oslo in Norway. Hanna Tiainen, a biomaterials researcher at the University of Oslo, told Retraction Watch: “This was an easy but multifaceted case of scientific misconduct that turned into quite a complicated investigation by the journals and publishers in the case.”

Tiainen said it all started “when we received persistent requests from a reviewer to cite totally irrelevant articles as part of the peer review process for our own paper. It was quite obvious that the reviewer in question was just fishing for citations for their latest publications.”

She added: “The reviewer was so pushy that I decided to have a closer look at the papers the reviewer was pressuring us to cite.”

In 2017, publishers Springer Nature retracted 107 research papers by Chinese authors published between 2012 and 2016 in the largest retraction ever of papers by Chinese authors. Springer Nature said it found the 107 papers had been submitted with the names of real researchers but fake email addresses.