An editorial director at Berlin-based publisher Springer noted on Wednesday that the recent retraction of articles by Chinese scientists is not representative of the overall quality of Chinese researchers’ work. The editor added that academic fraud is an international issue.

“Among all the articles published by Chinese researchers from 2012 to 2016, the removed ones only account for 0.03 percent of the total. The retraction will not disparage the pioneering achievements made by Chinese researchers,” Peter Butler, an editorial director at Springer for cell biology and biochemistry, told the China Youth Daily.

Butler’s remarks came after Springer announced on April 22 that it had retracted 107 articles written by Chinese institutions between 2012 and 2016 from its journal Tumor Biology. After a thorough investigation, the publisher said that the peer review process for those articles had been compromised.

According to a CCTV report, the retracted articles were submitted with reviewer suggestions, which had real names of researchers but fabricated email addresses. A follow-up investigation determined that the real researchers had never been contacted to review their peers’ work.

In response to questions about the merit of Chinese research, Butler freely acknowledged the many achievements of Chinese scientists, noting that in 1997, articles from China accounted for less than 2.5 percent of all articles included in the Science Citation Index (SCI). In 2006, Chinese scientists contributed more articles to the SCI than Great Britain or Germany.

Nevertheless, the academic scandal has sparked a heated debate over academic fraud in China, with some scholars condemning the country’s flawed evaluation system. A number of voices are calling on Chinese academia to focus more on quality than quantity when it comes to publishing.

“In China, many institutions use the quantity of articles published by an academic as the standard of assessment, which causes some research fellows to chase volume instead of quality in their study results,” Hu Xingdou, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, told the Global Times. Hu also opined that peer reviews should be made public so that all of society can help to supervise the process.