GoKawiilGeng Hongwei’s videos have sparked fierce debate on Chinese social media.Credit: Tom Houghton/Nature
Four senior Chinese academics have been disciplined after a blogger and former PhD student flagged data anomalies in their published papers and went viral in the process.
A blogger known as Student Geng, whose real name is Geng Hongwei, questioned the authenticity of the data in five papers and named five acclaimed researchers at four Chinese universities who co-authored the publications. The papers were published in Nature1 and three Nature-branded journals2–5. One accused researcher is under investigation at his university — the others have faced steep consequences following their institutions’ inquiries.
Data manipulation
In a series of videos published on Chinese social media in April and May, each lasting around five minutes and so far collectively watched almost ten million times, Geng explains how he analysed patterns in the data and concluded that the figures might have been fabricated.
For example, he assessed a spreadsheet in the source data of a paper published in Nature in November 2024 that studied how an enzyme in human bodies could regulate DNA damage1. Of the 280 data points in the spreadsheet, 76% ended with the number five, whereas only 6% ended with the number six, the second-most-common final digit. Geng explained that this pattern is extremely statistically unlikely.
Geng interpreted this as evidence of data manipulation: “Are you telling me that these figures are authentic?” he asked in one video. After giving more examples of figures ending with five in the same paper, he mocked: “These tables show the authors’ love for the number five.”
In April, an editor’s note was posted to the paper, alerting readers to concerns about data reliability and saying an investigation was under way. Editor’s notes were added to the four other papers in May and June.
In another spreadsheet, from a paper published in Nature Cancer6 in January 2024 that proposed a way to fight hard-to-treat cancers, the two digits after the decimal point of each of its 64 figures are identical to those of the figures located in the cell in the same position on the next sheet, suggesting that they might have been fabricated, Geng says.
“These two tables show that the authors do not care about their readers and despise the authority of scientific research,” Geng jokingly commented.
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