There has been so much evidence to sully the reputations of Chen Chen-yuan (陳震遠) — also known as Peter Chen — and his twin, Chen Chen-wu (陳震武) — that they have no chance of continuing their academic careers, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Lin Yi-bing (林一平) said yesterday.
An initial investigation by the ministry has found that the Chen brothers not only lied to Journal of Vibration and Control (JVC), which has withdrawn 60 papers bearing the name of Chen Chen-yuan, including some that list former minister of education Chiang Wei-ling (蔣偉寧), but also to a German journal, Natural Hazards.
Chiang stepped down on Monday amid the growing uproar over the paper scandal. He has claimed no knowledge of being connected to the retracted paper until the scandal erupted last week.
SAGE Publications, publisher of JVC, has said that Chen Chen-yuan, a former associate professor at National Pingtung University of Education, created a number of false accounts to subvert its peer review process.
He resigned from the school after it began probing the peer review process at the request of SAGE Publications.
Chen Chen-wu is a professor at National Kaohsiung Marine University.
It has now come to light that in the first 12 pages of a paper he contributed to Natural Hazards, 111 of the 124 sources cited — or 90 percent — were his own.
In another paper carried by the same journal, a single term “man-machine interface” cites 87 references, all from his own research.
The speed with which his papers were reviewed and passed aroused suspicion.
Of the 21 papers he contributed to Natural Hazards, 15 were approved within one month — compared with the six-month period the ministry said is normal.
Lin said the ministry has asked Natural Hazards to explain why some of the papers contributed by the brothers could pass the review process and be published in as little as two weeks.
Although an academic ethics review committee has yet to examine the brothers’ cases, Lin said it was unlikely the Chens would be able to survive in the academic world.
What Taiwan should do now is not hound the brothers and debate their punishment, but build a good mechanism to avoid a repeat of such a scandal, Lin said.
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