Research integrity in China: precautions when searching the Chinese literature

Quantitative analysis of the current status and research trends of biochar research - A scientific bibliometric analysis based on global research achievements from 2003 to 2023

Biochar has excellent physical and chemical properties such as porosity, high carbon content, high cation exchange capacity, and rich surface functional groups and has been widely used in environmental remediation. Over the past 20 years, although various reviews have described the application of biochar as an environmentally friendly multifunctional material in environmental remediation, no comprehensive summary and analysis of the research trends in this field exists. To promote the rapid and stable development of the field of biochar, the current state of research on biochar is clarified using the bibliometric method in this report, and potential development directions and challenges for the future are identified. All relevant biochar literature from 2003-2023 was collected from the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure and Web of Science Core Collection. A total of 6,119 published Chinese papers and 25,174 English papers were selected for the quantitative analysis. CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and Scimago graphics software was used to summarize the numbers of papers published over the years, as well as the countries, institutions, and authors that published the most articles. Secondly, using keyword co-occurrence and emergence analysis, the recognized research hotspots in different areas such as adsorbents, soil remediation, catalytic oxidation, supercapacitors, and "biochar-microbial" synergy were analyzed. Finally, the prospects and challenges of biochar were assessed to provide new perspectives for further promoting its development in technological, economic, environmental, and other aspects.

Essential signals in publication trends and collaboration patterns in global Research Integrity and Research Ethics (RIRE)

Amid an increasingly demanding research environment, there has been a growing interest in studies concerning Research Integrity and Research Ethics (RIRE). Between 1990 and 2020, over 9700 publications were published to address problematic research conduct such as falsification, plagiarism, and related protocols and standards. In this work, country-level trends and collaborative structures are examined with respect to economic group. Our results showed that RIRE publications are predominantly led by the West, with North America and Western Europe contributing the most. While there is interest within growing economies such as China, the pace is not comparable to its overall publications. However, international collaborations on RIRE grew to account for nearly 30% of all publications on the subject in 2020. Although there is a stronger preference for high income countries to collaborate with other high income countries, we observe a rise in partnerships between high-/middle-income and middle-/lower-income co-authorship pairs in the last decade. These trends point to a maturing global community with distributed knowledge transfer, towards more unified international standards for research ethics and integrity.

Integrity in Biomedical Research: A Systematic Review of Studies in China

Recent empirical evidence has demonstrated that research misconduct occurs to a substantial degree in biomedical research. It has been suggested that scientific integrity is also of concern in China, but this seems to be based largely on anecdotal evidence. We, therefore, sought to explore the Chinese situation, by making a systematic review of published empirical studies on biomedical research integrity in China. One of our purposes was also to summarize the existing body of research published in Chinese. We searched the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang Data, PubMed and Web of Science for potentially relevant studies, and included studies meeting our inclusion criteria, i.e. mainly those presenting empirically obtained data about the practice of research in China. All the data was extracted and synthesized using an inductive approach. Twenty-one studies were included for review. Two studies used qualitative methods (interviews) and nineteen studies used quantitative methods (questionnaires). Studies involved mainly medical postgraduates and nurses and they investigated awareness, attitudes, perceptions and experiences of research integrity and misconduct. Most of the participants in these 21 studies reported that research integrity is of great importance and that they obey academic norms during their research. Nevertheless, the occurrence of research misbehaviors, such as fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, improper authorship and duplicate submission was also reported. Strengthening research integrity training, developing the governance system and improving the scientific evaluation system were areas of particular attention in several studies. Our review demonstrates that a substantial number of articles have been devoted to research integrity in China, but only a few studies provide empirical evidence. With more safeguard measures of research integrity being taken in China, it would be crucial to conduct more research to explore researchers' in-depth perceptions and evaluate the changes.