Beijing News (Reporter Fan Shuo) Recently, a number of scientific researchers pointed out on the academic exchange website Pubpeer that 25 papers by Zhan Qimin, Executive Vice President of Peking University, Director of the Medical Department, and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering were suspected of "fake". On July 23, Zhan Qimin responded on his WeChat public account "Xiaomin ScienceArt", saying that he had carefully verified the relevant article expressions and experimental results with the paper collaborators, and conducted serious discussions. So far, no data fraud or academic misconduct has been found.
A reporter from the Beijing News logged onto the Pubpeer website and found that the above-mentioned researchers believed that the 25 papers questioned by Zhan Qimin had problems such as duplicate experimental images and errors in experimental methods, and some animal experiments involved ethical issues. As of the time of publication, the team of Zhan Qimin responded to queries on four of the papers on the website, and made corrections to the other four papers. For example, researchers pointed out that the paper "Multi-region sequencing unveils novel actionable targets and spatial heterogeneity in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma" published by Zhan Qimin's team in "Nature Communications" in 2019 has the problem of image duplication. Yongping Cui, one of the authors of the paper, responded that the research team “wrongly used the same pictures” and they have contacted the editorial department of Nature Communications to correct the above errors.
In response to the above questioning, on July 23, Zhan Qimin responded on his WeChat public account "Xiaomin ScienceArt" that he was carefully verifying relevant article expressions and experimental results with his collaborators and conducting serious discussions. "At present, we have not found data falsification and academic misconduct, and the verified experimental results are reliable and repeatable. There are indeed marked errors in a few papers, which do not involve academic misconduct or affect scientific conclusions. We Corrigendums are being communicated with related magazines in accordance with academic practice."
According to Zhan Qimin, the team is also actively responding to the reviewers' different views on the experimental methods used by the team, their incomprehension of some of the contents of related papers, and ethical issues involving animal experiments, and discussing and communicating with the reviewers. "We will take a rigorous attitude to further comprehensively verify, objectively answer questions, and complete relevant corrections. Please pay attention and supervision from the academic community."