The impact of “Five No’s for Publication” on academic misconduct

ABSTRACT

China initiated the “Five No’s for Publication” in December 2015 as a response to rising incidents of retraction. Use the number of retracted publications and their original publication time as proxies to investigate the effect of the Five No’s policy on academic misconduct. We searched the Retraction Watch Database for research articles published by Chinese scholars from 1 March 2010 to 29 February 2020. The short- and long-term trends of the number of publications were presented by conducting an interrupted time series analysis in quarterly time units. Of 4,215 retracted papers with Chinese authors, 2,881 involving academic misconduct were identified. In the first quarter (12.01.2015–02.29.2016) after the implementation of the Five No’s, an average reduction of 55.80 (p < 0.001) publications that involve academic misconduct was observed, although there was an increase in the trend of publications of 3.34 per quarter (p < 0.01) in the long run (12.01.2015–02.29.2020), relative to the pre-intervention period (03.01.2010–11.30.2015). The validity of these results was further supported by three different robustness checks. China’s government should strengthen enforcement, promote education, and improve the scientific evaluation system to consolidate the influence of the Five No’s policy and foster an ethical research environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic misconduct
• scientific integrity
• Retraction Watch
• interrupted time series analysis
• policy evaluation

Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank the Retraction Watch team for making this database available.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Conceptualization: HW, JG; Data curation: HW, JG; Methodology: HW; Formal analysis: HW; Visualization: HW; Writing – original draft preparation: HW; Writing – review and editing: HW, JG; Supervision: JG. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The dataset supporting the results and conclusions of this article is available in the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository at https://osf.io/c28qk/?view_only=7a5faf39b24d479c81d4c24470f35bfe.

Notes

1. We use the term “academic misconduct” rather than “research misconduct” because the latter is often limited to plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Scientific Data Sharing Platform for Population and Health under Grant NCMI-YF01N-201906. The funding source had no role in the design, methods, analysis, and preparation of this paper.