China conducts nationwide audit of research misconduct after thousands of papers retracted

The Chinese government has launched a nationwide review of research misconduct in response to Hindawi retracting thousands of papers by Chinese authors. China has the highest retraction rate globally, including conference papers, exceeding 20 per 10,000 articles. Hindawi, a subsidiary of Wiley, retracted over 8000 articles in 2023 involving a Chinese co-author, a record-breaking year for retractions that resulted in Wiley announcing that it would stop using the Hindawi brand and fold the journals into the rest of its portfolio.

As part of the review, China’s education ministry will require universities to declare all retractions and report any misconduct. Universities will have to compile a comprehensive list detailing all academic articles from English and Chinese language journals in the past three years and why they were retracted. ‘It seems to me a good move to investigate the retraction and scientific misconduct. This will certainly do good to improve the scientific environment,’ says Shu Li at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry.