Consider using an eye-catching expressions such as "path-making, world-leading or innovative" to describe your research achievements? Please double-check if they are deserved.

In recent months efforts are being made to curb growing cheating both in social and natural sciences.

In June, the Ministry of Education asked academic circles to behave themselves and take responsibility of their academic accomplishments. It released a list of criteria on academic studies in the fields of philosophy and social sciences in higher institutions. This involves many specific rules on writing academic papers and books, as well as on academic evaluation.

The Ministry of Science and Technology, in charge of a huge amount of research funds, is busy designing a systematic mechanism to ensure transparent use of the country's growing budgetary research funds.

A major step in the endeavour is its unveiling of a guideline document last Thursday to govern credit management of the related parties involved in the research funds.

All parties concerned, including management officials, project contractors and expert appraisers, must be under supervision and their credit records will be taken into a nationwide-sharing computerized database.

The government responded against growing academic discreditable activities, which are now pervasive in the country as it is transforming itself from a planned economy to a market-oriented one.

Some bidders for national R&D projects fabricate technical and economic returns, some academic appraisers cannot stick to fairness and some intermediaries even play foul in trading commercial profits.

Among others, violators also cheat by forging one's educational background or working experience, plagiarism, distorting original data, sending contributions to more than one publisher, affixing one's name to research papers that he or she makes no contribution and making false commercial advertisements.

All the violations have not only seriously damaged national science management, but also distracted scientists from research and forced them to put more emphasis on scrounging for funds.

The academic corruption not only happens with scientists and researchers. Government officials should also be supervised.

Some officials in charge of administrative or budget affairs sometimes overstep their authority to meddle with specific science subjects, severely interfering with scientists in their research.

More absurdly, many important scientific research evaluations are handled not by leading scientists but by administrative or finance officials.

The result is that non-experts, such as officials from administrative or budget offices, are in charge of the decision-making process.

Recently, the public has complained about the high number of aging experts involved in China's National High-Tech Research and Development Programme, also known as the "863 Programme."

Some officials are interfering with academic research under the programme, which has used a total investment of US$1.8 billion since the government launched it in March 1986.

Even Ma Songde, vice-minister of Science and Technology, believes that improvements in supervision and management are needed in order to make the programme more open and fair.

The existing imperfect academic evaluation system, which puts more emphasis on how many books a scholar writes and how many papers he or she publishes, works as the root cause for academic corruption.

Along with the country's effort to set up a credit management system nationwide within five years, the Ministry of Science and Technology has been taking the lead since it started the effort in 2001.

Now, it aims to gather credit records which will include basic information, wrongdoings and achievements of the parties concerned in scientific research. And the records become basis on which the government decides the distribution of research funds, presently surpassing 1 per cent of its total gross domestic product (GDP).

An appraisal mechanism with expert consultation will be set up to evaluate records and the government considers making the public able to evaluate the information.

In the long run, all national R&D projects should be under credit management, which standardizes professional codes and activities in scientific research.

(China Daily September 8, 2004)