A
distinguished Chinese immunologist, Cao Xuetao, has been cleared of significant
wrong-doing more than a year after the government launched an investigation to review 63 manuscripts co-authored
by Cao containing suspected problematic images. The investigating committee
found that none of the papers contained plagiarized or fabricated data, but
that some had images had been “misused”, which “reflected a lack of rigorous
laboratory management”. Cao must now correct those papers and has been barred
from applying for grants or recruiting students for a year.
Research
leaders in China have been cracking down on problematic research for several
years, following ongoing issues with plagiarism and research misconduct. Cao,
now the president of Nankai University in Tianjin, China and a prominent voice
for strengthening research integrity in the country, is among the most
high-profile scientists to be investigated. The papers in question were
published before he became university president.
The
investigating committee, comprising representatives from the ministries of
science and education, and several other government agencies, published a
summary of its conclusions online on 21 January. However, it gave few details
about the investigation, including how many of Cao’s papers contained misused
images. Several scientists contacted by Nature criticized this
lack of transparency; others disagreed with the committee’s findings.
Meet this
super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers
“It is
astonishing that [the committee] concluded that no fraud had been committed in
any of these cases,” says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist based in the San
Francisco Bay Area, California, who first raised issues about Cao’s papers in
November 2019, which triggered the investigation. Bik devotes her time to spotting problematic images in scientific papers.
Bik says that
in some of Cao’s papers, the same images have been used to represent different
experiments, which could have been accidental. “That is sloppy, but does not
necessarily mean it was done intentionally,” she says. But other papers contain
images with unnaturally repetitive elements. “I cannot think of any technical
reason or failure to correctly label images that could explain those repeats,”
she says. “The images appear to be altered.”
Huang Futao,
who studies higher education at Hiroshima University in Japan, says Cao should
now explain why there are so many problematic images in his papers, and what
measures he will take to prevent similar problems in the future.
Grueling investigation
Cao says the
investigation was grueling. He and his colleagues handed over 1500 pages of
material some stretching back more than 15 years, repeated experiments, and
submitted new data. Cao says he was corresponding author on 54 of the papers
investigated and that 35 contained unintentional errors resulting in image
misuse. He blames the lack of “unified definitions and journal policies
regarding image processing” ten to fifteen years ago when the problematic
papers were published. “What are classified as ‘errors’ today might not be
considered errors back then but instead, acceptable practices,” he says. Cao
did not respond to Bik’s suggestion that some images looked intentionally
altered.
In November
2019, Bik raised concerns on the academic discussion forum PubPeer about
problematic images in dozens of papers written by Cao and his group. Several
other people, mostly anonymous, raised similar issues in other papers from the
group. At the time, Cao said his lab would investigate the issues raised and
was confident they did not alter the paper’s conclusions. Some of Cao’s
co-authors replied on PubPeer that some mistakes were honest errors, such as images
being mislabeled.
As a result
of the investigation, the committee ordered Cao to respond to the concerns in
the papers in question and carry out corrections. Based on a Nature analysis,
19 have been corrected and 3 have been withdrawn since Bik first flagged the
papers. Cao is also prevented from applying for national science and technology
projects, and from acting as a scientific expert in any activities using
government funds.
Cao says he
will improve data archiving and image processing procedures in his laboratory.
“We’re confident that with more stringent and updated data management and
education, we’ll continue to make positive contributions to the advancement of
human health and disease research,” he says.
Bik says that
the most important upshot of the investigation is the committee’s instruction
to Cao is to retract or correct the papers in question — but she is concerned
that more papers have still not been retracted.
Sun Ping, a
former research-integrity officer at China’s science ministry who now consults
on research integrity at Siyidi International Education Consulting and Service
in Beijing, would like the committee to make details of its investigation
public. “If the investigation report can be made public, the interested readers
will make their own judgements,” says Sun.
Others investigated
The committee
also released its findings on several other researchers’ papers that had been
flagged for problematic images. They found no evidence of fraud in papers by Li
Hongliang, a cardiovascular researcher and dean of the School of Basic Medical
Sciences at Wuhan University in China, but did identify misuse of images that
“reflected the lack of rigorous processing of experimental data”. Li will face
the same penalties as Cao, but they will last for two years.
The committee
also found no evidence of fraud in papers by Geng Meiyu, a pharmacologist at
the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, China, who gained fame with a
controversial and contested finding that suggested a seaweed extract can slow
decline in people with Alzheimer’s disease, but reprimanded her for incorrect
use of images in papers. Nor did they find evidence of fraud in papers by Pei
Gang, a molecular biologist at the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell
Biology, China, and by Rao Yi, a neuroscientist at Capital Medical University
in Beijing.
Li, Geng and
Rao did not respond to requests for comment on the committee’s findings. Pei
says the investigation into his papers was a waste of resources. “I still want
to know what the evidence was that started this,” he says.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-00219-4
