Recently, Taiwanese scholars accused a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Journalism of Fudan University of academic misconduct, alleging that almost the entire content of their work was plagiarized from four Master’s theses and published in top-tier journals. On February 25th, Fudan University confirmed the plagiarism allegations as true and deemed the situation severe.
On February 23rd, Yeh Zhan, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Literature at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, along with two scholars, Zhang Huanyi and Wang Xiuru, took to Facebook to accuse Wang Can, a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Journalism at Fudan University and an associate professor at Wuhan University of Technology, of maliciously plagiarizing four of their papers from 2022 to 2024. These plagiarized papers were then published in mainland China’s top journals such as “Literary Criticism,” “Opera Studies,” and “Research on Chinese Publishing History.”
Yeh Zhan pointed out that Wang Can’s four papers were copied “word for word,” including footnotes and even illustrations, without any mention of the original authors, constituting a very serious case of academic misconduct. The deliberate plagiarism four times within a span of just two years not only severely infringed upon the research achievements of the original authors but also amounted to intentional fraud in the humanities academic community.
After Yeh Zhan and others requested the journals to retract the papers, the editorial boards of “Opera Studies,” “Research on Chinese Publishing History,” and “Literary Criticism” verified the plagiarism and agreed to retract the papers, with retractions to be announced in the next print issue.
On February 25th, the Post-Doctoral Mobility Station of the School of Journalism and Communication at Fudan University reported that in December 2024, the Academic Norms Committee of Fudan University received reports of Wang Can’s alleged academic violations. Following an investigation, it was found that the reported incidents involving the four papers constitute “academic misconduct” with severe circumstances. In January of this year, according to regulations, the station took action to remove Wang Can from the institution based on the reported misconduct.