Nearly half of the science-related workers in China's research institutes, universities, medical institutes and hospitals think academic cheating is "common," a survey by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) showed.

The survey, released here Friday, showed that 43.4 percent of the 30,078 respondents think plagiarism is "really" or "rather" serious in China. About 45.2 percent of them were worried about fabrication.

Furthermore, 55.5 percent said they were sure of at least one case of plagiarism, fabrication or sending one thesis to several journals for publication, among science researchers they knew in real life.

Cheating has always been a big headache for the Chinese academic circle. It has been highlighted since last October when an associate professor of pharmacology at the famed Zhejiang University was found plagiarizing in eight of his theses.

He Haibo, the cheating professor, was dismissed by the university in November. His case evoked heated public discussions as it also involved Li Lianda, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and one of the country's first-class scientists.

In the survey, 30.3 percent of the workers attributed cheating to the current evaluation system that appraises researchers' academic performances largely by the number of theses they wrote and had published.

A total of 18.4 percent of them thought it was due to incompetent supervision.

(Xinhua News Agency July 11, 2009)