Science 6 March 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5919, pp. 1280 - 1281
DOI: 10.1126/science.323.5919.1280
    
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News of the Week
SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT:
Retractions Put Spotlight on China's Part-Time Professor System
Hao Xin

BEIJING--Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a slippery subject: In herbal concoctions, it's often difficult to discern active compounds from fillers and contaminants. Sorting wheat from chaff is all the harder when data themselves are concocted. In the latest scandal to grip Chinese academia, Zhejiang University (Zheda) in Hangzhou last November fired an associate professor in a recently established TCM research lab after finding him guilty of scientific misconduct, the university said in a statement. Three journal articles have been retracted so far out of eight that the university has charged contain plagiarized or fabricated data. Since then, more questionable papers have come to light.

The case, which came to national attention in February, could have widespread fallout. Some observers criticize Zheda for firing the junior researcher, He Haibo, before the investigation is complete. "I don't think Zhejiang University handled the case properly," says Zhang Haixia, a professor at Peking (Beijing) University who led a misconduct inquiry a few years back. "What about the responsibility of the corresponding author?" asks Zhang. The handling of the case has sparked an outcry in Chinese media and on the Internet focused on the senior scientist who established the TCM lab and, more broadly, on a system that critics say gives power but little accountability to academicians.

In 2004, Zheda recruited Li Lianda, who was elected the previous year as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, to be part-time dean of its College of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Li, an expert on TCM modernization, also set up a lab at Zheda and has supported it with a 5-year, $430,000 grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology to study TCM drugs for cardiovascular disease. But Li spends most of his time in his main lab in Beijing, where official meetings require his presence, as he has explained to Chinese media.

He Haibo joined the Hangzhou lab as its first postdoc in July 2006 after receiving a Ph.D. from China Pharmaceutical University in Nanjing 1 month earlier. Judging from his publication record, He was a dynamo. Between April and November 2007, he submitted eight manuscripts on which he was first author to international journals; all appeared in print in 2007 or 2008. According to a Chinese reporter who tracked down a former grad student in the lab, He was well-liked because he helped students fulfill the college's requirement that Ph.D. candidates publish one first-authored and at least a second paper in a journal in the Science Citation Index database. (Since 2006, Zheda has published more indexed papers than has any other Chinese university.) As a reward for He's remarkable productivity, Zheda hired him as an associate professor last July.

Figure 1 In the crossfire. Academician Li Lianda remotely oversees a lab that has been shaken by allegations of plagiarism.

CREDIT: HE TAO/SCIENCE NEWS

Things quickly unraveled for He. In October, an editor at the International Journal of Cardiology came across a paper in Phytotherapy Research with figures and tables similar to those in a manuscript IJC was about to publish. The manuscript reported a study on two molecules in a signaling pathway involved in irregular heart palpitations caused by inflamed cardio muscles in rats, whereas the published paper is about the same pathway during a heart attack. On 11 October, the editor contacted the manuscript's senior author, pharmacologist Dai De-Zai of China Pharmaceutical University, for an explanation, according to Dai's blog. Dai--who was He's Ph.D. adviser--wrote in his blog that he was surprised to see that his former student had, as Dai alleged, plagiarized graphs, tables, and texts from his lab. In his blog, Dai says he got in touch with the executive vice dean of Zheda's pharmacology school and contacted the journal that published He's paper. Contacted by e-mail, Dai declined to provide further comment.

According to a Zheda statement received by Science on 13 February, the college confronted He on 16 October; administrators asked him to retract the fraudulent paper, reflect on his mistakes, and apologize to his former adviser. Ten days later, according to the statement, He submitted a self-criticism essay in which he cleared Li of any knowledge of his wrongdoing and then left the college. To protect privacy, the university says, it is not making He's essay public. Zheda President Yang Wei told Chinese media that He, in his self-criticism, said he committed misconduct because he was desperate for a faculty position, which would enable him to remain at Zheda and earn a living. After ascertaining that He had e-mailed the requisite retraction to Phytotherapy Research, Zheda says, the university fired him on 13 November. He Haibo could not be reached by telephone and did not respond to e-mail messages.

The story did not end there. Li and his lab came under fire on the Internet. On 23 October, an anonymous posting on New Threads (www.xysforum.org) alleged that Li's Zheda lab published duplicate articles in Pharmacological Research and Naunyn-Schmiedeberg's Archives of Pharmacology. Apparently, before he disappeared, He e-mailed both journals to retract the papers, giving "duplicate publication" as the reason, according to e-mails provided to Science. The journal editors alerted Zheda to the retractions. Three days later, another anonymous posting on New Threads alleged that the duplicate papers, along with a third in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, contain fabricated data.

The postings caught the eye of Zhu Guo-Guang, a TCM practitioner in Oulu, Finland. Zhu downloaded the three papers for a closer look and says he found fabricated data "written in black and white." To Zhu, the alleged misconduct is a big blow to TCM research. "Fake research worsens the reputation of traditional Chinese medicine," he says. As a vice chair of the Pan European Federation of TCM Societies, Zhu says he felt a responsibility to report his findings to the three journals and to Zheda. Zhu assembled the evidence and mailed hard copies to the journal editors and to Yang Wei in mid-November. As Chinese netizens turned up more questionable journal articles from Li's Hangzhou lab, Zhu set up a blog to post his analysis and provide updates.

Figure 2 Vanishing data. Three of at least eight challenged papers have been withdrawn or corrected.

Zhu's allegations grabbed national attention after they were reported in a 3 February article in the Chinese newspaper 21st Century Business Herald. Zheda issued a statement the next day, laying the blame on He and stating that Li's name had been given as a coauthor of the fraudulent papers without Li's authorization. Yang Wei says he is now personally sending out retraction requests.

Meanwhile, more anonymous postings appeared on New Threads; Zheda now says that 19 publications allegedly have problems, including papers from Li's lab at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing and by other members of the Hangzhou lab that did not include He as an author.

A team led by Harold Garner of University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas has analyzed several papers and added them to the Déjà vu database of extremely similar publications (spore.swmed.edu/dejavu/duplicate/74404/); also see entries 75181 through 75184. "We try to provide the most unbiased data possible which an appropriate body, such as an editorial board or a university ethics board, can use to make their own evaluations," says Garner.

The scandal has prompted fresh debate about moonlighting by academicians. Many, like Li, hold two or more positions in addition to their main job, often in different cities as part-time deans or lab chiefs. Universities eagerly recruit academicians because these elite scientists advise various levels of government on research and funding priorities, review grants, and evaluate achievements. At least two-thirds of Zheda's 15 science and engineering deans are such part-timers.

Li acknowledges that he visits Hangzhou only a half-dozen times a year, spends 3 to 5 days in the college, and has only 1 day for his five or six grad students in the TCM lab. Wu Limao, who received his Ph.D. from Li's Beijing lab in 2004, ran the lab's day-to-day operations until August 2008 when Wu left to spend 2 years as a visiting researcher at Yale University. Li says that, as a victim of He's fraud, he has become a subject of investigation.

In the meantime, Zheda has expanded its probe and has asked Wu to return to Hangzhou to answer some questions. Wu is corresponding author on eight papers that Zheda has found to be fraudulent and first or corresponding author of other papers called into question. According to a preliminary investigation report received by Science on 25 February, the university faults Wu for not reviewing the papers before publication. Wu declined to comment for this article.

The saga is inflicting collateral damage on researchers who have collaborated with Li's labs. Phytotherapy Research Editor-in-Chief Elizabeth Williamson says the journal is preparing to retract more articles from Li's labs and has held up all manuscripts with authors whose names appear on suspicious papers, pending Zheda's further investigation. "I don't want to penalize honest people, but it's getting difficult to know who to trust these days," she says.