Chinese Scientist Admits To Stealing Chip Research

An anonymous reader writes "A prominent Chinese scientist, one of the founders of the chip manufacturing industry in the country, has admitted to stealing his research." From the article: "Chen Jin, a dean of Shanghai's prestigious Jiaotong University and the leader of a government-funded high-tech research project, was dismissed from his university posts this week and stripped of other government titles and perks. The government also said that Chen had been permanently banned from taking part in any government-funded science projects. In a statement Friday, Jiaotong University--one of the nation's elite schools--said, 'Chen Jin has breached the trust of being a scientist and educator. His behavior is despicable.'"

Comments

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Plagiarism and fake research have become rampant in China, and are eroding people's trust in academia, Ren Yuing, a member of the Councillors' Office of the State Council, told the recent meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the top advisory body.

He cited a recent survey of 180 PhD degree holders, of whom 60 per cent paid to be published in academic journals; and about the same percentage copied others' work.

Based on my own experience working with a visiting scientist, this seems to be a problem in Korea as well. I did alot of work with this scientist that yielded some interesting results at the beginning. This scientist went on to do other research while I wanted to continue probing our initial experiments. Eventually, I stopped working with this scientist because of their methodology (tossing out data that didn't agree with the hypothesis, abusing statistics to make conclusions, misrepresenting the methodology period) and desire to make a huge breakthrough in the field.

This is one datapoint though, so I am generalizing alot. What makes me suspect that there is a problem in Korea is that I came to find out that, somehow, this scientist had published these results in well-known Korean scientific journals. This disturbed me and my colleagues because we didn't want our names anywhere on those papers as they represented the worst in research. Not to mention the fact that they were just an abuse of the trust people have in scientists. We've since severed relations with this scientist, but we shudder at what was going on. It simply was not good science and should never have been published. We suspected bribes or connections.

I've not had similar experiences working with Taiwanese or Japanese researchers though. While I've always been aware of problems in China (and these news reports simply reaffirm it), the research papers produced by Taiwanese and Japanese researchers have generally been quite good. I'll also point out that my old advisor did research with a Korean researcher who was apparently very good, though I never worked with him directly and I've worked with some talented Chinese scientists, so this shouldn't be used as a pretext to devalue the contributions of all Chinese or Korean scientists. It should be seen as a need to start examining what's wrong in those countries with respect to science.

And yes, I am posting anonymously out of professional concerns.