Two Tsinghua scholars found guilty of plagiarism

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A Tsinghua University PhD student and his doctoral advisor were revoked of their respective degrees and job titles after at least 11 published papers authored by the pair were retracted from international academic journals for various misconduct, according to the school's recent statement.

Initial reports uncovering potential problems in these published studies surfaced in March 2016, the statement said.

Tsinghua University faces controversy after exposing an academic scandal in a statement released on Oct. 21, 2018. /VCG Photo

However, it's unclear whether the university disclosed the information previously, or issued the late statement after the recent allegation surfaced on Retraction Watch, a blog which reports on scientific papers being retracted, and the growing media coverage on the topic which has garnered widespread attention.

On Oct. 21, the Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, disclosed that two material scientists, a student surnamed Ye and his supervisor surnamed Tang, were found guilty of academic fraud back in 2017 in multiple papers authored by the two.

The Graduate School at Shenzhen is a subsidiary of Tsinghua University. /VCG Photo

The statement revealed that Tsinghua's branch in Shenzhen City, south China's Guangdong Province, had stripped Ye of his PhD degree on Apr 28, 2017, and removed Tang, the advisor – who has retired now – of his position as head of the materials department and deputy director of the New Materials Research Institute in the following June, as the result of an internal investigation launched by the school committee in Jan. 2017.

Evidence of the misconduct, unveiled by Retraction Watch, involves self-plagiarism including content duplication, image manipulation, data fabrication, as well as deceptive authorship such as fake signatures, and other issues.

Ye and Tang's names often appeared together as authors in a variety of science journals dating back to 2014, with the most recent publications arriving in 2016.

Tsinghua University has overtaken the National University of Singapore to become the best university in Asia in THE World University Rankings 2019. /VCG Photo

The latest retraction was regarding a paper published by the pair, tilted "Effects of high-energy electro-pulsing treatment on microstructure, mechanical properties and corrosion behavior of Ti–6Al–4V alloy" in the journal Materials Science and Engineering.

Three images used in this paper looked very similar to images that appeared in five other papers published by the authors, according to Retraction Watch.

The case, however, was first spotted by Hanna Tiainen, a Norwich scholar, along with her colleagues.

She describes the case as an easy one, but multifaceted due to the scholars and publications involved.

The Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, reiterates its zero-tolerance policy toward academic misconduct in the Oct. 21 statement. /VCG Photo

Tiainen decided to look deeper after she received persistent requests from what she called a "pushy" reviewer, who pressured her to cite totally irrelevant articles written by her and her colleagues, according to Retraction Watch.

What she and her colleagues later uncovered was starling. They then decided to report the results to the editors of the relevant journals.

"I found in total 16 published papers (thanks to excessive self-citing by the authors) that kept recycling the same results but with rearranged and slightly reedited figure panels…" Tiainen was cited by Retraction Watch as saying.