Well-known Chinese financial news media group Caixin recently reported that the professional international journal Tumor Biology not long ago officially announced the retraction of 107 Chinese papers that had been published between 2012 and 2016, citing fraud that had occurred during the peer review process. The action was taken based on the recommendations that the global Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) had made. According to the publisher of Tumor Biology, Springer, the authors of these papers created fake email addresses using the names of specialists and experts in the field in order to provide positive reviews for these papers, without the knowledge of these specialists. The authors of these papers are from famous hospitals, universities, and institutes from several major cities in China. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the SCI (Science Citation Index) fraud that originated in China. Another example is, in 2015, the British journal BioMed Central retracted 43 papers, 41 of which were from China. Last year, Caixin sent undercover reporters to investigate the underground SCI fraud market and found that some Chinese journal networks that had ties with SCI member magazines actually conduct this type of fraud for profit.
Source: Caixin, April 21, 2017
http://china.caixin.com/2017-04-21/101081664.html