Why are most papers in the medical field withdrawn?

In 20 15, springer Publishing Group withdrew the manuscript twice on a large scale. For the first time, BMC Publishing Company under the Group withdrew 43 academic articles at the end of March. 18 On August 2nd, springer Publishing Group withdrew 64 scientific research papers published in its 10 academic weekly, and most of the authors involved were from China. The number of manuscripts rejected twice is 107. Today, two years later, the article "Tumor Biology" 107 published by springer Publishing Group has been withdrawn at one time. According to the list provided by springer, the authors involved are all from China, including many famous schools such as Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University and China Medical University. The two 107 articles are obviously coincidences, but what is the reason behind this is worth our deep thinking.

Among all these revoked papers in China, medical papers account for the majority. Why? Is it medicine or medical research in China that has the biggest problem? What's the problem? It is very important to explain this problem clearly, because it reflects a special contradiction in academic evaluation in China today, focusing on the group of doctors.

The basic logic behind this is that doctors need papers for promotion, and different levels of hospitals have different requirements. Ordinary hospitals need domestic journals, while larger hospitals need core journals, and some affiliated hospitals of medical universities are required to be included in SCI. It can be found that all the magazines whose manuscripts were withdrawn were included in SCI, and the authors were basically doctors in the affiliated hospital of medical university or the top three hospitals. Isn't there such a problem in China journals? Of course not. Some people say that the problem is more serious just because few people investigate it.

The root cause is that the academic evaluation method is rough and simple, and only the journal impact factors are considered, regardless of the specific content of the paper, which leads to the emergence of many interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary papers, because as long as they are SCI, as long as they are the first author or correspondent, they meet the promotion conditions, and it is not surprising to read the specific content of the paper. Some people with flexible brains take advantage of this evaluation defect and spend money on papers. Some flexible people, by studying the review process of magazines and taking advantage of the loopholes in some magazines, ask the authors to recommend reviewers, forge fake reviewers and review their own manuscripts, but the review process is recorded and accumulated, and it is easy to be identified if investigation is carried out.

All doctors are forced to publish papers, and different levels of hospitals have different requirements. People who ask chinese magazine are lucky because they are not verified. However, the requirements of SCI magazine are much higher, especially when there are systematic events, which are easier to be identified and exposed.

SCI magazines have different grades. Low-level SCI magazines generally have a high tolerance for academic misconduct, and the attention of the whole academic society is relatively low. Even if there are some problems, most of them will not be investigated. The problems existing in the whole international academic community may be great, and the proportion that is really exposed and identified is definitely relatively small. If the problematic article is published in a very famous magazine, more people will pay attention to it, and the chances of being asked to investigate and withdraw the manuscript will also increase. The most typical example is the paper withdrawn by Kohokata. Some articles in magazines such as Nature and Science are rejected every year, which is a very typical case.

There are three main problems in the scientific research evaluation system. First, researchers and managers are not genuinely concerned about scientific research. Second, it pays too much attention to quantitative indicators and ignores subjective or peer evaluation. Third, it is too tolerant of academic misconduct.

There are a large number of researchers in China, but the proportion of researchers who really love and devote themselves to scientific research is not high. Many researchers regard scientific research as a job to support their families, but they don't really like it. There are many cases of passive scientific research. In this respect, doctors in many hospitals are particularly prominent. Originally, they were real clinicians, and doing scientific research was entirely for the promotion of professional titles. They lack the intrinsic motivation to engage in scientific research, and of course they also lack the time and platform conditions to engage in scientific research. In this case, the appearance of some marginal papers is the inevitable result. We can notice a phenomenon that many papers published by doctors are basic research, which is purely based on animal models, cell and molecular biology, and is far from clinical problems. Why is this happening? Because such an article can be completed by one person without too many conditions, and many clinical studies are difficult to fight alone.

Quantitative evaluation index is a very important method of academic evaluation, but quantitative evaluation can not completely and accurately evaluate academic quality. For a few high-quality studies, quantification may even lead to jokes. Because truly innovative research is often understood by only a few people. Only those popular and fashionable studies can easily get better quantitative evaluation. Therefore, quantitative and subjective indicators are widely used in the world, and the important position of peer evaluation will not be abandoned at any time. Although peer evaluation has great personal and subjective factors, if it is used fairly and reasonably, the relative position of a research and a scholar in this academic field can be obtained more accurately.

The international academic community has basically zero tolerance for academic misconduct. As long as there is academic misconduct, the scholar basically loses his academic life. In China, this kind of situation is very rare, and it is very common for many scholars to take up their posts with illness. There are two reasons for this problem. First, the academic culture of academic behavior has long been ignored. Second, academic misconduct is universal, with frequent problems, and some people are punished without blaming the public. China's academic development is rapid, and the quantity and quality of academic papers are improving, but China's academic connotation is relatively insufficient. One of the key problems is that our attitude towards academic misconduct is too mild.

Indicate that this article is from the blog of Sun Science Network.