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发帖数: 4978 | 1 China's Publication Bazaar
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6162/1035.full
A Science investigation has uncovered a smorgasbord of questionable
practices including paying for author's slots on papers written by other
scientists and buying papers from online brokers.
SHANGHAI, CHINA—The e-mail arrived around noon from the mysterious sender "
Publish SCI Paper," with the subject line "Transfer co-first author and co-
corresponding author." A message body uncluttered with pleasantries
contained a scientific abstract with all the usual ingredients, bar one:
author names. The message said that the paper, describing a potential
strategy for curbing drug resistance in cancer cells, had been accepted by
Elsevier's International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology. Now its
authorship was for sale.
"There are some authors who don't have much use for their papers after they'
re published, and they can be transferred to you," a sales agent for a
company called Wanfang Huizhi told a Science reporter posing as a scientist.
Wanfang Huizhi, the agent explained, acts as an intermediary between
researchers with forthcoming papers in good journals and scientists needing
to snag publications. The company would sell the title of co–first author
on the cancer paper for 90,000 yuan ($14,800). Adding two names—co–first
author and co–corresponding author—would run $26,300, with a deposit due
upon acceptance and the rest on publication. A purported sales document from
Wanfang Huizhi obtained by Science touts the convenience of this kind of
arrangement: "You only need to pay attention to your academic research. The
heavy labor can be left to us. Our service can help you make progress in
your academic path!"
On 6 July, a few weeks after our conversation with the sales agent took
place, the paper appeared online in the International Journal of
Biochemistry & Cell Biology. The print version followed in September,
roughly when the agent said it would. The title and abstract had undergone
minor revisions from the e-mail solicitation.
Since 2000, Chinese papers have increased sixfold in Thomson Reuters' SCI
Expanded, a database of more than 8500 journals.
"CREDIT: THOMSON REUTERS"
But the list of authors was transformed. On the published paper, two first
authors share the honor. (Our reporter did not pay for authorship.)
Interviews with authors and with the journal's editors confirmed that a
first author was added on 11 June, approximately a week after our reporter
received the abstract; all deny knowledge of anyone having paid for
authorship. Following an inquiry from Science, an investigation by the
International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology found that a total of
four authors had been added, and two dropped. (The exuberant agent had erred
on one detail during our June conversation with her: By then, the paper had
undergone one round of review, but had not yet been accepted. The
resubmitted version with a different author lineup was accepted soon after.)
"CREDIT: ADAPTED FROM AKINDO/ISTOCKPHOTO.COM"
Earlier this month, Science told Wanfang Huizhi about our undercover
operation. In an e-mailed response, Huang Wei, who identified himself as
Wanfang Huizhi's manager, denied that his firm sells authorship. The sales
document that Science had obtained was not authentic, he said, because it
did not bear his company's official seal. Wanfang Huizhi helps authors with
"language polishing, editing, and submission of manuscripts," he wrote, so
it is "very probable" that the cancer paper's authors had sought editing
help from the firm. Our reporter may have encountered a rogue employee or
former employee who had "gone through irregular channels" to hawk authorship
on the side, Huang wrote. He stated that Wanfang Huizhi would investigate
the matter.
The sales agent's offer is far from an anomaly in China's publishing scene.
A 5-month investigation by Science has uncovered a flourishing academic
black market involving shady agencies, corrupt scientists, and compromised
editors—many of them operating in plain view. The commodity: papers in
journals indexed by Thomson Reuters' Science Citation Index (SCI), Thomson
Reuters' Social Sciences Citation Index, and Elsevier's Engineering Index.
Science has documented authorship fees ranging from $1600 to $26,300. At the
high end, fees exceed the annual salary of some Chinese assistant
professors. But SCI papers—particularly those published in journals with a
high impact factor—are so critical to getting promotions that researchers
shell out. As Fan Dongsheng, a neurologist and former vice president of
Peking University Third Hospital, puts it: "People are sparing no expense in
order to get published in international journals."
The options include not just paying for an author's slot on a paper written
by other scientists but also self-plagiarizing by translating a paper
already published in Chinese and resubmitting it in English; hiring a
ghostwriter to compose a paper from faked or independently gathered data; or
simply buying a paper from an online catalog of manuscripts—often with a
guarantee of publication.
Offering these services are brokers who hawk titles and SCI paper abstracts
from their perches in China; individuals such as a Chinese graduate student
who keeps a blog listing unpublished papers for sale; fly-by-night
operations that advertise online; and established companies like Wanfang
Huizhi that also offer an array of above-board services, such as arranging
conferences and producing tailor-made coins and commemorative stamps.
Agencies boast at conferences that they can write papers for scientists who
lack data. They cold-call journal editors. They troll for customers in chat
programs. "SCI papers transfer: papers about cervical cancer; head and neck
cancer; kidney cancer; stomach cancer; nano-materials," reads a chat message
to one editor. They set up toll-free hotlines.
Some of the journals in which brokered papers appear belong to Chinese
publishers, whereas others are located overseas and owned by publishing
giants. Although the agencies market themselves to researchers in fields
like medical research, in which time constraints make satisfying promotion
requirements especially difficult, scientists in a range of disciplines—
even those who publish on academic honesty and publishing ethics—say they
have been approached. Nearly all the editors and researchers in China whom
Science contacted about SCI paper-selling agencies were aware of their
existence.
Science looked into 27 agencies that trade in SCI papers. Our targets
included agencies identified by scientists we interviewed and others we
found using Baidu, a popular Chinese Web search engine. Inputting "publish
SCI paper" in Baidu pulls up dozens of agencies with websites brazenly
touting the sale of papers for publication in SCI-ranked journals. "
Ghostwrite and ghost-publish papers…SCI paper publishing," reads one
typical description. We targeted the top search results. We also looked into
agencies that had purchased ads on Baidu and posted in online publishing
forums, focusing on those that seemed most established. Scientists and
journal editors in China, many of them speaking under condition of anonymity
, helped round out our portrait of the business.
Posing as graduate students and scientists, Science reporters contacted the
selected agencies by phone or via the Chinese messaging service QQ,
inquiring about buying authorship on a paper or paying the company to write
a paper. A mere five of the 27 companies we contacted refused to write
papers or broker authorship. We also tracked individual papers. Some were
advertised for sale ahead of publication and have not yet appeared. Others
appeared in reputable journals several months after they were proffered.
Academic honesty has been a hot-button issue in China for years, and
officials hoping to project a more international image have repeatedly vowed
to address it. Since coming to power in March, President Xi Jinping has
spearheaded a broad attack on corruption, with the government taking aim at
a spectrum of misbehavior that ranges from bribing officials to
pharmaceutical company payoffs (Science, 2 August, p. 445). The campaign has
spilled over into scientific publishing: In September, police disguised as
gas company employees busted seven people who, operating out of a Beijing
apartment, offered space in fake journals and collected publication fees
from scientists. Their victims blew up to $650 in fees for papers that never
saw the light of day.
But most of the corrupt publishing practices that Science investigated have
no clear victims; scientists, brokers, and some journal editors all benefit.
What is at risk, say prominent researchers in China, is China's wider
achievement in science. The country has become a powerhouse in scientific
publishing: The number of SCI Expanded papers originating in China
skyrocketed from 41,417 in 2002 to 193,733 in 2012, ranking it second in the
world, after the United States. Corrupt publication practices taint that
achievement. "[Some scientists] are publishing better and better papers and
getting into top-notch journals, but in the end they don't even know what
their papers say," says Cao Zexian, a physicist at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences' Institute of Physics in Beijing. "They spend a lot of money hiring
researchers to write them."
Skewed incentives
Chinese-language journals are a prime outlet for the paper-sellers. "The
number of articles appearing in Chinese-language journals that has been sold
is very high," says one journal editor in Beijing. Many companies
investigated by Science offer to sell papers in Chinese-language journals.
The purported Wanfang Huizhi sales document delineates the cost of buying
articles in "core journals"—a select group of Chinese-language journals
ranked by either Peking University, Nanjing University, or the Institute of
Scientific and Technical Information of China.
For most Chinese scientists, however, the gold standard is English-language
journals, especially the 3746 ranked by SCI, a database of citations
introduced in 1963 by the Institute for Scientific Information. Thomson
Reuters, which now owns the institute, uses the index to compute each
journal's "impact factor," a tally of how many times the average article in
a journal is cited in a given year. Thomson Reuters bills impact factors as
a way to compare journals within fields. Evaluating individual researchers
by the impact factor of the journals they publish in is "not something that
we advocate," says Nicholas Stipp, business development director with
Thomson Reuters in Beijing.
But in China, "SCI papers have become the yardstick to promote scientists,"
says Cong Cao, an expert on Chinese science policy at the University of
Nottingham in the United Kingdom. The number of papers a researcher has
published in SCI-ranked journals over a 5-year period is often the deciding
factor in promotions—and typically only papers on which the candidate is a
first author or corresponding author count. (Publications in Chinese core
journals can be credited toward promotions as well, but a researcher usually
must amass many more of them during a short period to meet requirements.)
Some universities require Ph.D. students to publish one or more SCI papers
to graduate. Incentive schemes have yielded an environment in which
scientists "focus on quantity, not quality," wrote Lin Songqing, an editor
with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, in a paper in Learned
Publishing in January. (A running joke in China now is that SCI stands for
Stupid Chinese Idea.)
Pressure to publish is especially acute for medical researchers. Even for
doctors, of whom the vast majority in China work in government hospitals or
clinics, securing a promotion can hinge on writing SCI papers—regardless of
how many patients they see.
With the stakes so high, ways of gaming the system have cropped up.
Researchers who are "eager for quick success or maybe have a low academic
level" turn to SCI paper brokerages, says Zhang Yuehong, editor of the
Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE in Hangzhou and an advocate for
improving journal oversight in China. (The journal is indexed in SCI
Expanded.) By passing off bought papers as legitimate research, she says, "
they replace pearls with fish eyes."
Because many promotion schemes in China simply tally up a researcher's total
SCI publications without regard to impact factor, some paper-selling
agencies target journals with negligible impact factors; a spot in SCI is
enough. But Chinese institutions dole out lavish rewards ranging into the
tens of thousands of dollars for publishing in highly rated journals—
meaning that researchers who pay agencies for papers may get a return on
their investment.
The paper-pushers
At one end of the spectrum of services offered by China's SCI-paper cottage
industry, companies will translate into English a paper published in a
Chinese journal. (The purported Wanfang Huizhi document specifies that
researchers should avoid submitting Chinese-language papers whose abstracts
can be found in PubMed.) In another arrangement called daixie, or "
ghostwriting," a scientist will hire an agency to write a paper—a task
sometimes farmed out to graduate students—and ensure its publication in a
specified journal. Too busy to format papers, prepare citations and graphs
according to a journal's specifications, analyze statistics, submit your
paper, and answer queries from editors when a paper is in proofs? SCI
Science Paper Service Center can handle all of the above, brags its website.
Several agencies claim they collaborate with specific journals indexed in
SCI to guarantee publication. A representative for one company, Haixin, was
blunt about the collaborations: "We rely on our guanxi"—a Chinese concept
evoking relationships often deepened by exchanging gifts. "To put it simply,
we give them money." At least three companies offer to assist scientists
who have written a paper and want to ensure its publication. Other firms
claim to purchase a set number of pages in journals. Several agencies
specified both the journal and issue in which a paper would appear—even
though the paper had yet to be written.
An editor at one SCI journal in China says the journal regularly receives
multiple submissions from a single e-mail address. It rejects them under the
assumption that the papers are ghostwritten. Other agencies may seek out
journal editors willing to enter an arrangement. One editor, who worked for
6 years at a Chinese journal listed in Elsevier's Engineering Index, says
that in that time he was approached by scientists in need of papers about 10
times. "They asked me to add their names to the papers of another author,"
hinting that he would be compensated for the favor. Later, as his own 5-year
review approached as a professor, an editor at an SCI Expanded journal
offered him an author's slot on a paper in exchange for ghostwriting another
paper.
Other editors say they have never heard of counterparts collaborating on
paper-selling deals, and that for an editor at an internationally ranked
journal the risks of being on the take are too high. "Many editors are
trying hard to improve the quality of their journals, and they hate this
kind of fraud," says the former Engineering Index journal editor. "Maybe a
small group is engaged in this kind of activity." But, he continues, "It
completely destroys the academic environment."
One seeming conduit for paid publication is the Chinese Medical Journal, an
open-access journal published by the Chinese Medical Association. Agents at
eight of the companies we contacted claim they can arrange publication in
the journal, for fees ranging from $1600 to $4600. Until Science reached the
journal's managing director, Wang Mouyue, by phone in late October, the "
links" section on the journal's homepage featured the logo of Sciedit, a
Guangzhou-based agency whose representative sent a Science reporter an
abstract of a paper that was purportedly for sale. But Wang told Science it
is "impossible" that Chinese Medical Journal editors take payments for
ensuring a paper's publication. "China's paper-selling market is very large,
and there's every sort of agency imaginable out there. But our journal hasn
't cooperated with any agency in order to sell articles." The Sciedit logo
was later removed from the journal's website. A man who identified himself
only as Mr. Wang and claimed to be Sciedit's owner declined to answer
questions about collaboration with the Chinese Medical Journal.
Full service
Some agencies claim they not only prepare and submit papers for a client:
They furnish the data as well. "IT'S UNBELIEVABLE: YOU CAN PUBLISH SCI
PAPERS WITHOUT DOING EXPERIMENTS," boasts a flashing banner on Sciedit's
website.
One timesaver: a ready stock of abstracts at hand for clients who need to
get published fast. Jiecheng Editing and Translation entices clients on its
website with titles of papers that only lack authors. An agency
representative told an undercover Science reporter that the company buys
data from a national laboratory in Hunan province.
For scientists who have qualms about attaching their names to data of
questionable provenance, many agencies offer to write meta-analyses or
review papers, based on already-published data. The fact that review
articles can be written without gathering original data has made them wildly
popular in China, says Deborah Yang, marketing and sales director for China
for Editage, a reputable international editing company, in Shanghai. From
2003 to 2011, the number of meta-analyses from China listed in PubMed
increased more than 16 times faster than did meta-analyses from the United
States, far outstripping the overall rise in papers from China. Sciedit's Mr
. Wang says the reference on his agency's website to publishing without
doing experiments refers to meta-analyses. "We don't write [papers], we just
help with revisions and language polishing," he wrote in an e-mail to
Science.
A customer service representative with H&G IES told an undercover
Sciencereporter that the agency could write a paper and guarantee
publication in an international journal. Reached by phone, Kevin Chang,
chief editor at H&G IES, elaborated: "If a person doesn't have any data or
an article, what we can do at the most is to write a review paper. … We don
't make up data." Chang was more cautious in a later e-mail, stating that H&
G IES provides only "editing and consulting services, not writing." The
customer service representative, he explained, was "undertrained."
There may be less to many of these agencies than meets the eye. H&G IES's
website advertises its "US Root, Global Reach" and, until Science reached
Chang, claimed to have representatives serving France, Germany, Japan, Korea
, Spain, and Vietnam. But its website includes content only in English and
Chinese, and the lone telephone number listed until recently was a Google
Voice number. Chang did not respond to questions about the company's size.
The Chinese paper-selling agencies also inhabit a murky legal space, as
several agency representatives acknowledged in chats with an undercover
Science reporter. But, at least in some cases, they seem to deliver on their
promises. On 21 August 2012, Core Editing advertised authorship for sale on
12 papers listed on its blog. Eight were meta-analyses; the other four were
original research. Of the dozen, at least two have since been published by
Chinese authors in SCI journals.
Corresponding authors of the two papers—one published in OncoTargets and
Therapy and the other in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences—did
not respond to repeated interview requests. An e-mail to the address
connected to the QQ messaging service number on Core Editing's blog elicited
this reply: "I apologize if the blog's content inadvertently violated
certain writers' rights…. If the famous Science Magazine goes so far as to
be interested in a personal blog, isn't it making a big fuss over a small
issue?" The page advertising papers for sale has since been deleted.
In those two cases, the brokered papers had not yet been submitted, raising
the possibility that any original authors may have transferred the
authorship to Core Editing's clients. In an e-mail to Science, Hans-Joachim
Schmoll, editor-in-chief of OncoTargets and Therapy, wrote that his journal
is investigating the paper and will consider retracting it if the
investigation shows its authorship to be suspect. Robert Chen, editor of the
Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, told Science that his journal
will pursue a similar course of action.
Another common brokerage method is bringing on authors after a paper has
gone through peer review. Such an approach takes advantage of journal
policies allowing authors to be added at late stages—a change sometimes
legitimately necessary because of issues raised by reviewers. Such practices
have contributed to a boom in co-first authors and co-corresponding authors
in China, says Cao Zexian—so common, he jokes, that they're "a Chinese
invention."
At the International Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology, the overhaul of
the author list in the paper purportedly brokered by Wanfang Huizhi went
unnoticed. Typically, if new authors are brought on, the corresponding
author is expected to explain the change to the editor handling the paper.
That didn't happen with the cancer paper, Joanna Kargul, the journal's
managing editor, wrote in an e-mail to Science: "The authorship change
slipped the radar of the reviewers and the handling editor."
Outside China, ignorance of the methods used by agencies may prevent editors
from spotting brokered papers. Schmoll notes that many editors struggle to
evaluate the flood of papers from China: "We don't know the universities, we
don't know the clinics, we don't know the research institutions." He adds:
We have to either reject everything or evaluate [papers] as normal."
Winds of change?
At a publishing conference sponsored by the China Association for Science
and Technology in Hangzhou last September and attended by editors from
across China, Thomson Reuters' Stipp was the star of the show. As he clicked
through PowerPoint slides explaining how journals are selected for the Web
of Science, the broad citation database that encompasses SCI, audience
members crowded the screen, snapping photos. A slide showing a huge leap in
the number of Chinese journals listed brought hearty applause.
Globally, the past few years have seen a growing shift away from science's
overreliance on impact factors. In May, 155 scientists from 78 scientific
organizations signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, a
document drafted at the December 2012 meeting of the American Society for
Cell Biology (Science, 17 May, p. 787). The declaration advocates abandoning
the use of journal impact factors to assess individual researchers. Chinese
science leaders are steering in that direction (see Editorial, p. 1019).
Thomson Reuters is working with the National Natural Science Foundation of
China, the science ministry's Institute of Scientific and Technical
Information of China, and the Ministry of Education to introduce other
evaluation measures for authors, such as total paper citations and number of
patents awarded.
One way to more explicitly combat paper-selling is to beef up authorship
requirements. Following recurring revelations of pharmaceutical company
ghostwriting at international medical journals over the past decade, several
leading journals adopted more stringent standards, requiring that each
author detail his or her involvement in the research upon submission. Some
journals ask for one of the authors to serve as a "guarantor" of a paper's
integrity and authorship from inception to publication. And editors say an
increasing number of journals based in China warn authors that they are not
affiliated with any paper-selling companies.
Basing academic evaluation on peer review rather than on impact factors
would also curtail fraud, argues Jianwu Tang, an ecologist at the Marine
Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who conducts research
part of the year in China. "In a specific field, our colleagues know pretty
much what we are doing," he notes. Others say that scientists caught in
publication scams should face stricter punishments. For now, agencies and
their clients are operating with impunity. Under China's current setup, says
one editor, "what you gain [by buying papers] is more than you lose if you
are found to commit academic fraud."
As for the paper whose abstract the Wanfang Huizhi agent sent our reporter,
the authors offered a range of explanations for the late changes in the
author list. Asked about the decision to add a second first author,
corresponding author Wang Xuedong of the Fifth People's Hospital of Wuxi and
the Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University in Wuxi responded in
an e-mail: "The entire submission was prepared by the first author, so I'm
not very clear about the situation you mentioned." He explained that the
first author had suggested adding as a co-first author a former classmate
who had helped with the work. As to how the Wanfang Huizhi agent could have
described authorship on the paper as for sale, he wrote: "We do not know
through what channels the agency obtained the abstract to our paper."
The original first author, Wang Qingping of Shaoxing Hospital of China
Medical University in Shaoxing, denied that the authorship change had been
his idea. Reached by telephone, he said, "The co–first author's name was
added after discussion among the other authors. It was not my decision alone
." In response to an e-mailed copy of the abstract obtained from Wanfang
Huizhi, he wrote that he was shocked at the suggestion that 90,000 yuan ($14
,800) had changed hands: "You don't mean [Japanese] yen?"
Wang Yu, the new first author whose name appears in the slot that the agent
claimed was for sale, remains a mystery. The Southwest Hospital of the Third
Military Medical University in Chongqing, listed on the paper as her
affiliation, did not provide her telephone number. There's no trace of her
online, apart from a few doctor review sites. The paper in the International
Journal of Biochemistry & Cell Biology appears to be Wang Yu's first
publication in an SCI journal. An unintended consequence was her debut in
Science as well. | m****1
发帖数: 736 | 2 by a similar token, is it unethical to add the name of the author's spouse
to a paper that is totally unrelated to the spouse's scope of work? |
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