The Dual Role of Peer-Review Systems in Developing Countries

“Innovation is one of the key goals of China’s current five-year plan, and the country’s universities have come under tremendous pressure to improve and apply their research. This has contributed to an apparent epidemic of fraud, as professors falsify or plagiarize their research to gain promotion or simply to meet societal expectations and political goals…. Critics point out that such fraud is easy to perpetrate and hard to detect because China does not have a rigorous peer-review system: academic boards are often composed of nonexpert officials, and universities are frequently run by administrators whose primary qualification is Communist Party loyalty.”1