Integrity and research ethics are cherished institutions in academic world. Although most societies have rules and codes that govern ethical conducts in research, few studies have provided quantitative evidence on the impacts of these regulations and codes on the behaviors of researchers. In the context of a nationwide anti-corruption campaign in China, this paper evaluates the changes of principal investigators’ reimbursement behavior in a leading university when new reimbursement policies were introduced. Utilizing a novel grant dataset and a regression discontinuity (...) design, we find that the new policies lowered PIs’ monthly average amount of reimbursement from research grants by 35%, which can be interpreted as a reduction in grant misuse. Following speculations we argue that institutionalizing orchestrated efforts on grant management, payroll systems, and research integrity education is in the right direction toward building China into a true scientific power. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This study aimed to outline the profile of retractions of scientific articles on COVID-19 published in journals indexed in the Scopus database between 2020 and 2021. To analyze the data, we used a bibliometric technique, with the Bibliometrix package in the R-Studio software, and descriptive statistics. Twenty-nine retractions were analyzed, and we found that the most common reasons for retraction were related to ethical issues and that 68.97% of authors have previously retracted articles. We concluded that there appears to have (...) been a change in the publication policies of journals, which resulted in an increase in scientific retractions related to COVID-19 during the study period. (shrink)

Increasingly, scholarly journals have begun retracting published articles for reasons other than those described by advisory organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Numerous research articles have been retracted of late due to political concerns. Additionally, some articles have been retracted for behavioral misconduct, which was also the subject of a recent COPE discussion forum. ‘Behavioral misconduct’ denotes harmful or immoral behavior of one or more authors that is unrelated to the article’s findings or content. We investigated whether (...) federally funded research scientists considered behavioral misconduct a valid reason for retracting published findings and whether the type of behavioral misconduct involved, the level of the expected scientific impact of the article in question, or the kind of editorial action taken affected their support of retraction. Of the 464 participants who took our survey, we found that researchers largely oppose retraction of a published article or removing an author when scientists commit behavioral misconduct, regardless of the type of misconduct involved. However, there was greater support for retraction when the misconduct was financial as compared to racial or sexual misconduct. Not surprisingly, researchers were more likely to use the published information in question in their own work when its impact was high. Future studies should investigate the extent to which these findings are moderated by researchers’ editorial experience and other demographic factors. (shrink)