Students Graduated from Hubei University of Medicine Are Selling Authorship on Chinese Social Media
Recently, the 5GH team noticed a student graduated from Hubei University of Medicine are selling authorship on RedNote, a Chinese social media.
His advertisement reads:
"小弟硕士期间水了一些文章，现即将出国读博，找人合作写文章，赚点生活费"
"可以出第一作者和通讯作者"
Like many authorship-for-sale advertisements on Chinese social medias, this advertisement covers up the selling of academic articles under the so-called collaboration, and the advertisement states that the first/corresponding authors are available for the clients.
To demonstrate his capability to complete these papers, the person behind this advertisement show several screenshots of the acceptance letters for his articles, published during his master's program. And these information of the acceptance letters allow us identify who is behind this matter: LIU Heng with the Hubei University of Medicine.
These nine articles exhibit abnormal patterns. (1) They were published within a short span, from the second half of 2024 to recently. (2) Most of these articles are about secondary analysis on public database.
It is noted that secondary analysis on public database, such as the Global Burden of Disease Study database, is the hot spot among the articles got involved in authorship-for-sale issues. One can find tens, even hundreds, of such advertisements on Chinese social medias, claiming that they can help researchers to conduct secondary analysis on public database and/or complete the writing of the articles. All of these advertisements cover up the selling of the articles under "advising" or "collaboration". Therefore, the publishers and/or journals should pay more attentions to such articles.
