Viola's Dreamworld

Saturday, August 4, 2007

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I refer to the article "China blacklists 13 academics for fraud", published in The Straits Times on 4 August, 2007.

"China has blacklisted 13 academics for falsifying scientific data, fabricating applications and plagiarism as it tries to foster innovation in a fraud-ridden climate" writes the article.

You could say that I was shocked when I saw this article. My first thought was, aren't academics supposed to know the rules? Mention the word "academics" or "scholars" or "researchers", and our immediate impression is of someone who is well-versed in literary speech, whose written work is of high quality, and whose works can be trusted.

Yet today we have a case of fraud. And the number is astounding. Not one, but thirteen, academics were found guilty for faking data and for plagiarism. Two included professors, one at Wuhan University and the other at the Civil Aviation University of China. Their punishment? Being "criticised" and suspended from receiving research funding for three years.

But wait a minute. If you have read the article carefully, you would have noticed that the word "criticised" is written as "criticised". What exactly does this mean? I am guessing that the author of this article is trying to say that the professors were not exactly criticised, with a stern tone to it. Perhaps they were only given a simple warning. But is this enough? Professors are supposed to know the rules, yet they still defied it. A harsher punishment should have been given to them instead.

The report also mentioned "a series of high-profile scientific scandals at China's top universities last year raised public concern over the supervision of academic research". Such cases are serious because they raise questions about the quality of academic work. Education is supposedly supposed to teach right from wrong. Plagarism and faking of data is definitely in the wrong. Since academics are people with a high level of education, such fraud cases should not be seen. Yet, this is definitely happening in China.

An article I read two days ago said that China's literacy rate was growing. This is a good thing, but I wonder if such fraud cases will then increase? Perhaps with the increased literacy rate of the population academics are more pressurised to produce high quality work, or be eliminated from the competition. This may push them to extremes, resulting in such fraud cases. This could hold serious implications because many companies and various organisational bodies refer to such academic articles to make many important decisions. If data in these articles are false, dire consquences may result. Take for example a paper highlighting the increasing consumer preference for branded goods. Companies producing these goods may then use the information to decide whether to raise prices or stock up on their goods. If the statistics were faked, the market response may not meet the companies' initial expectations, and thus incur huge losses. This could spell bad news for the economy.

"Last year, My Chen Jin, a US-educated dean at Shanghai's elite Jiaotong University, was sacked for faking chip research". From this example we could perhaps question the rationale behind all these fraud cases. Clearly, the institution of education which they went to is not a question, because even a US-educated dean was found guilty of fraud. It is not just China's academics. A possibility may be that academics in China face too much pressure to churn out quality papers in a short time. This is even more so for academics specialising in enviromental studies. With the increased media scrunity on China's enviromental control and pollution levels, these academics are pushed to the limits to investigate the causes and identify the root causes. It may be that with tight deadlines to meet but with insufficient materials, they may then be tempted to forge data.

Yet, it is important for China to "pour more resources into scientific breakthroughs or risk being left a minor player in global technological advances". However, this can only be done if academics take their work seriously and bear in mind not to forge data at any cost. I suggest reducing the pressure on them to churn out work in a short period of time to solve this problem.

After all, the people look up to the well-educated to guide them. If these people make mistakes, then what are the rest of the country's population supposed to follow?

-when are you coming back? ;