The 16 secret retractions of Xuetao Cao at JBC

1. Investigation conclusions and handling opinions on academician Cao Xuetao’s thesis

The 63 papers of Academician Cao Xuetao were questioned on the Internet. After investigation, no fraud, plagiarism and plagiarism were found, but many papers were found to have misuse of pictures, reflecting the lack of a strict laboratory management. After reviewing the joint working mechanism, it was decided to cancel Academician Cao Xuetao’s qualification for applying for the national science and technology plan projects for one year, cancel his qualification as an expert in scientific and technological activities supported by financial funds for one year, and cancel the qualification for enrolling graduate students for one year. He is instructed to carry out corrections, make in-depth inspections of existing problems, and report criticisms in the corresponding department of the Academy of Engineering.

A slap on the wrist, but good news: no misconduct found and no retractions requested, hinting that the CCP disapproves of JBC‘s previous actions. Chinese media duly reported, and so did western science journalists. Science titled “High-profile Chinese scientist cleared of fraud and plagiarism charges involving more than 60 papers“, mentioning 4 retractions, including the one from 2015. Nature‘s headline went: “Famed Chinese immunologist cleared of plagiarism and fraud” and mentioned only 3 withdrawals. Chemistry World, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, ran this title: “Prominent Chinese immunologist and research integrity leader cleared of scientific misconduct“, and said that “At least four of Xuetao Cao’s papers flagged on PubPeer have been retracted to date“.

It was 16 at that time already, but for some reason they did not make it into the Retraction Watch database, which even at the time of writing listed only 8 retractions for Xuetao Cao (Correction: the RW database erroneously lists a corrigendum for Bao et al JBC 2012 as a retraction, meaning only 7 retractions are actually listed). Which is weird, this database was funded with $700k in grants to Retraction Watch and yet it still has such strange hickups.

And now, the CCP, or in this case rather the People’s Liberation Army, banned all reporting about the recent Cao retractions at JBC. Like the recent Oscar for the Chinese film director Chloé Zhao: it didn’t happen, try to even think about it and you’ll regret it.

Here is a screenshot of a short-lived article in Chinese. It was deleted soon after it appeared, and all that article wrote about Cao, after mentioning his acquittal in that misconduct investigation, was the list of his recently retracted 11 papers at JBC.

Before laughing at the ridiculous Chinese censorship which denies people basic information: where else did you read about Cao’s recently issued 12 extra retractions? Nowhere, that’s where. Remember that the last time Science and Nature wrote about Cao was to inform you of the CCP findings that he was innocent of research misconduct. In China, disobedience is punished mercilessly. You will get summoned to police, fired from your job, your relatives may get fired as well, your children expelled from school or university, you can get imprisoned or even executed, for your crime of stating facts you were not allowed to state because CCP said so.

But in the free world outside? Why are they all self-censoring then? Because your international publishing business might lose a paying customer, remember that China is the world’s biggest producer of scientific research, paper-wise. Sure, much of it is fake, made by paper mills even, but fiction is what scholarly publishing business is all about at the end.

Never mind, surely Retraction Watch and its intrepid watchdogs Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus covered the mass retractions of Cao, right? Well. This is what the search of the website delivers:

The older of the two articles, from 30.11.2019, merely mentions in passing “Four journals also say they are scrutinizing papers coauthored by Cao Xuetao after scientists raise questions about images on Twitter and PubPeer” (not on For Better Science obviously, Retraction Watch doesn’t even allow reader comments mentioning my site). The newer article from 30.09.2021 reports two retractions by Cao in JBC, in the story’s second section. After that: nothing, until today. Not even when Cao retracted 13 more papers later on. Retraction Watch is not interested in watching THAT kind of retractions, one could think.

[a reader pointed out below that I mistook two Cell corrigenda for new Cao papers in that journal (PubMed is a bit confusing in this regard). A paragraph here was deleted, I apologise for the confusion. Cao continues to publish quite well though, here Wang et al Immunity 2020 (Cell Press) or Liu et al PNAS 2020].

Especially since Elsevier uses the image integrity analysis software by this obscure Indian company TNQ to screen the submissions (a source with inside knowledge told me this). TNQ website doesn’t even advertise any image manipulation or duplication detection skills online, only general editing services, like html proof-reading. Does the TNQ image detection work? It depends on what Elsevier wants it to achieve. If the real purpose of this technology for Elsevier is to pretend to check, and to pretend the data passed the integrity tests, it works beautifully. Just like its counterpart Aira at Frontiers, it’s there to pretend, not to actually detect anything. We all care for research integrity here, and everything we publish has been vetted and hence 100% trustworthy!

In this regard, it is a bit worrisome that JBC is now being published by Elsevier. And what if the two people who drove the research integrity policy, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief Lila Gierash or the deputy editor and former ASBMB president Fred Guengerich, should step down one day? Will JBC be drawn to the dark side by Elsevier, never to retract a fraudulent paper again without authors’ permission?

As it happens, the new JBC publisher Elsevier already introduced some new rules. The original authors’ manuscripts, once very useful to de-construct inappropriately assembled images, have been all removed and replaced with low-resolution final edited versions. This is why for some of the retractions, those without earlier PubPeer clues, the original shenanigans cannot be traced back. Basically, Elsevier destroyed evidence.

Because nobody else does it, not even Retraction Watch in its database, I collated the 16 JBC retractions of Chairman Cao below. With illustrations.