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Research Misconduct Investigations in China’s Science Funding System

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Abstract

As stewards of public money, government funding agencies have the obligation and responsibility to uphold the integrity of funded research. Despite an increasing amount of empirical studies examining research-related misconduct, a majority of these studies focus on retracted publications. How agencies spot funding-relevant wrongdoing and what sanctions the offenders face remain largely unexplored. This is particularly true for public funding agencies in emerging science powers. To amend this oversight, we retrieved and analyzed all publicized investigation results from China’s largest basic research funding agency over the period from 2005 to 2021. Our findings reveal that both the “police patrol” and “fire alarm” approaches are used to identify misconduct and deter funding-related fraud in China. The principal triggers for investigations are journal article retractions, whistleblowing, and plagiarism detection software. Among the six funding-related misconduct types publicized and punished, the top three are: (1) fraudulent papers, (2) information fabrication and/or falsification in the research proposal, and (3) proposal plagiarism. The most common administrative sanctions are debarment and reclamation of grants. This article argues that more systematic research and cooperation among stakeholders is needed to cultivate research integrity in emerging science powers like China. Specific training and education should be provided for young scientists to help them avoid the pitfall of academic misconduct.

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Notes

  1. The data was retrieved and analyzed online on April 2, 2022, via the library at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. The search query and retrieved image are available upon request from the corresponding author.

  2. In addition to NSFC, other Chinese national funding agencies such as the National Social Science Foundation, the Ministry of Education, the NHC and so on are also involved in funding-related misconduct investigations. However, unlike NSFC, many institutions do not report sufficiently detailed information for analysis.

  3. These unstructured texts are available on the NSFC official website at https://www.nsfc.gov.cn/publish/portal0/jd/04/. This data is publicly available only from 2005. Accessed April 2, 2022.

  4. Among them, two decisions were sanctions against universities rather than individual researchers.

  5. This is unsurprising, given the General Program, which aims at supporting scientists in mainland China to propose self-selected research topics within the funding scopes of NSFC, constitutes a large share of annual applications. For example, in 2019, among 45,192 funded grants, 18,995 (about 42%) are from the General Program and 17,966 (about 40%) are from the Young Scientists Fund. Data source: https://www.nsfc.gov.cn/publish/portal0/ndbg/2019/02/. Accessed April 4, 2022.

  6. The remaining 16% report no identification mechanism in the decision notice.

  7. See US-based examples here: https://www.nsf.gov/oig/case-closeout/.

  8. For more about the application of the Sankey diagram, please refer to the work by Schmidt (2008).

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#72234001) and the Ministry of Education of China (#17YJAZH075). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders. We thank Dr. Hong Pan for her help in cross-checking the data coding. We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the conference on Bridging Philosophy, Ethics and Public Policy & Administration held at City University of Hong Kong and the 27th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators held in Leiden, The Netherlands. The authors are responsible for any errors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Li Tang

  2. Shanghai Health Development Research Center, Shanghai, 200040, China

    Linan Wang

  3. School of Public Economics and Administration, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Guangyuan Hu

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  1. Li Tang
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  2. Linan Wang
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Contributions

LT: Conceptualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, and Writing; LW: Data curation, Formal analysis; GH: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing.

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Correspondence to Guangyuan Hu.

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Tang, L., Wang, L. & Hu, G. Research Misconduct Investigations in China’s Science Funding System. Sci Eng Ethics 29, 39 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-023-00459-9

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