Fund punishes scientists for academic fraud

Government-funded scientists who were embroiled in an academic scandal that saw the retraction of 107 research papers by an international journal have received warnings or been banned from applying for funding.

In April, Springer, the publisher of Tumor Biology through 2016, retracted research papers by Chinese authors after discovering they had been compromised by fake peer reviews.

Of the 107 papers, 18 concerned projects funded by the central government's National Natural Science Fund, which this year has about 24.8 billion yuan ($3.72 billion).