'Disgraceful' researchers chastise their peers

By Chen Jia (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-11 11:22

More than half of science and technology researchers polled in a recent survey said they believe their peers engaged in "disgraceful behavior", including plagiarism, according to the latest study by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST).

Some 55.5 percent of researchers reported they had witnessed disgraceful behavior in academia at least once, Wang Chunfa, a senior official of CAST, told a press meeting in Beijing on Friday. "Such behavior includes plagiarism, falsifying or fabricating academic achievement by using research from other sources," he said.

The CAST finding was based on 30,078 questionnaires sent out under 209 pilot studies nationwide in the second half of 2008. More than 43 percent of researchers polled also said plagiarism in the country's academia was "very serious".

Still, more than 30 percent of the researchers said they "sympathized" with those who plagiarized because of the tremendous pressure they were under to perform in their respective fields. About one-fifth of those polled said such mistakes also warranted some form of forgiveness because of the pressures.

"Researchers have to spend too much effort on publishing a certain number of academic papers every year, which is supposed to help them build up their academic reputation and garner them more research funding," Wang said.

The CAST study found that about 13 percent of those polled attributed plagiarism to researchers' "poor self-discipline".

In the latest case, Yang Lun, a PhD candidate at Beijing Normal University, was thrown out for plagiarizing a research paper and smearing the name of a vice-president in the process. In the paper, Lun included the name of his tutor, Liaoning University vice-president Lu Jierong.