In response to the incident that the New Materials Research Institute of Shenzhen Graduate School of Tsinghua University has recently withdrawn 11 academic papers due to academic misconduct such as reusing pictures and forging authors, the Shenzhen Graduate School of Tsinghua University responded on October 21 that it had done so in 2017.Revocation of fraudulent student Ph.D. degrees and accountability of their supervisors.A related person from the institute told Caixin reporter that the academic misconduct was only the student's personal behavior.However, according to foreign media reports that first exposed the matter, the matter was discovered because a reviewer induced a scholar from the University of Oslo in Norway to cite his own article during the peer review process, which led to the discovery of the matter.
The Shenzhen Graduate School of Tsinghua University issued a statement on its official website, saying that there was information on the Internet about the retraction of several papers by Ye Xiaoxin, a Ph.D.Ye Xiaoxin entered the Shenzhen Graduate School of Tsinghua University to study for a doctorate in materials science and engineering in 2010. He graduated in July 2015 and received a doctorate from Tsinghua University. His advisor is Tang Guoyi, a professor at the Institute of Advanced Materials.
In March 2016, after receiving a report about possible academic problems in the papers published by Ye Xiaoxin as the first author, Professor Tang Guoyi immediately organized a comprehensive inspection of 16 papers published by Ye Xiaoxin during his doctoral studies, and found that there were self-plagiarism, photoIssues such as repeated use and fabrication of experimental results, etc., immediately communicated with relevant publishing institutions many times, and proposed a request for all manuscripts to be withdrawn.Through the verification of Ye Xiaoxin's doctoral dissertation, it was found that the above problems also existed.
The statement stated that after further inspection by the Shenzhen Graduate School of Tsinghua University, it was preliminarily judged that Ye Xiaoxin had committed serious academic misconduct.In January 2017, the school's academic committee set up a special working group to investigate and after discussion by the academic ethics subcommittee, it was determined that Ye Xiaoxin had committed serious academic misconduct, and his supervisor Tang Guoyi was responsible for guiding and managing it.On April 28, 2017, the school's academic degree evaluation committee held a plenary meeting and decided to revoke Ye Xiaoxin's doctoral degree, and the results of the processing were announced in the school.In June 2017, the institute stopped Professor Tang Guoyi from enrolling graduate students, revoked his positions as head of the materials discipline and deputy director of the Institute of New Materials, and he has already gone through the retirement procedures.
On October 21, a reporter from Caixin came to Professor Tang Guoyi's research group on the 15th floor of the Energy and Environment Building of the Shenzhen Graduate School of Tsinghua University. Since it was the weekend, there was no one there.Li Qiulin, an associate researcher at the institute's Institute of Advanced Materials, who is working in the office on the same floor, told Caixin reporter that this academic misconduct incident was Ye Xiaoxin's personal behavior., other students do not have this situation.
As far as I know, this student got dizzy and wanted to post some random things in order to graduate with a Ph.D.Later, when he saw that this situation had not been discovered in time, he became more and more courageous. Li Qiulin said that he even heard that Ye Xiaoxin registered an email address in the name of a mentor, and many articles were posted on the website where he could get feedbackIt is not the official mailbox of Teacher Tang (referring to Tang Guoyi). Tsinghua teachers’ mailboxes all have suffixes. Some Teacher Tang didn’t know it, and only found out later.
However, according to the Retraction Watch (Retraction Watch) website, which first exposed the academic misconduct incident, several scholars from the University of Oslo in Norway initially collected evidence and reported it. One of them, Dr. Hanna Tiainen, responded to Retraction Watch. Their paper was published inDuring the process of being peer reviewed, we kept receiving requests from a reviewer asking us to cite some completely irrelevant papers.Apparently this reviewer wanted to induce us to cite some of their recent papers, but he was so eager that I decided to take a closer look at the papers he was pressuring us to cite.
As of press time, Caixin reporters have not been able to contact scholars at the University of Oslo for comment.
It is difficult to judge who is responsible for the academic misconduct incident, but the person who asked others to cite the article and caused the misconduct to be exposed must be one of the authors of these articles who has the qualifications to review the manuscript.Cao Zexian, a researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the chief scientist of the 973 nanomaterials project of the Ministry of Science and Technology, told Caixin reporters that reviewers use the opportunity of reviewing manuscripts to ask others to cite their own articles.Articles of academic misconduct are often the object of criticism.
Due to the absurd practice of using the citation rate to judge the author's level in some places, some people with review qualifications often imply that the author of the article they review cites his article, and the author of the article often acquiesces in order for the article to be accepted and published smoothly.Reasonable or unreasonable requests from reviewers.However, this is the first time I have seen an example of asking the author of the reviewed article to quote his own article to make others anxious.Cao Zexian said.
Students cheat a lot, is the instructor really unaware?Who is the reviewer who repeatedly asked others to cite his paper?In response to the above questions, Caixin reporters asked Tang Guoyi and Ye Xiaoxin many times through emails and mobile phone text messages, but as of press time, they had not received a response.■
