An investigation into 41 Chinese research papers, retracted by an international publisher in March, confirmed they contained fabricated peer review.
The China Association for Science and Technology launched an investigation after BioMed Central, a major publisher of medical and science journals based in the United Kingdom, in March announced that it had retracted 43 papers because of fabricated peer reviews, 41 of which were written by Chinese scholars.
Writers of these science and medical articles had hired intermediate agencies to help them submit their papers to foreign academic journals, said a statement from the association on Thursday.
The service of these agencies included copy-editing, collecting peer reviews for the papers and handling contribution. Malpractice was involved, the statement said.
The agencies were found to have fabricated peer reviews and hired ghostwriters, it said.
The writers themselves had loose standard of academic ethics, the statement said.
To tackle this problem, the association issued a new code of conduct, telling scholars to not engage with intermediate agencies; provide false peer reviews; or list those who did not make substantial contributions to the paper as authors.
