High retraction rate of Chinese articles: it is time to do something about academic misconduct

Faced with the pressure to ‘publish or perish’, some scholars take risks at the expense of good faith. Since 2015, publishing groups such as Springer and Elsevier have withdrawn many articles by Chinese scholars.6 Clinicians in large hospitals in China are overworked and have stressful doctor–patient relationships, which leaves them exhausted.7 They may have little for scientific research. The cruel reality is that many hospitals in China do not use doctors’ medical expertise as the first criterion when awarding professional titles, but rather how many SCI papers they have published. [...]language barriers force Chinese authors to seek help from third-party companies. [...]repeated batch retraction and false peer review events suggest that the academic expertise of some editors is not deep enough to judge the academic quality of manuscripts, and they fail to carefully identify the authenticity of reviewers’ information.8 This is a problem of academic editors’ sense of responsibility as well as a problem of journal management. The fifth suggestion is that expert discussions on online forums and guidance from editorial associations are the current tools for retracting or avoiding problem publications.4 The Retraction Watch blog (http://retractionwatch.com/), established in 2010, is a valuable source of information for scientists worldwide. Since the launch, new withdrawal cases have been selectively announced to the public, encouraging open discussion of unacceptable behaviour by authors and action by publishers to prevent future retractions.