Michelle Wing Tung Cheng

Paper mills have been a growing challenge to the integrity of academic research, yet there has been a need for more empirical research on the impact, spread, and scope of the problem. This bibliometric study uses the Retraction Watch database to identify all of the paper mill papers that have been retracted. The search yielded 10,409 retracted paper mill papers since the database’s inception until 2024, with a massive spike in 2023. While research articles were most common, the results also showed conference abstract/papers, spiking in 2022, had gone through paper mills. The results show paper mill papers could be found from around the world, but the highest concentration came from China by far (9,137), representing 87.8% of all identified paper mill papers. The study identified over 97,093 co-author pairs from across the world in these papers. Papers labeled as Business and Technology, Business and Life Sciences, and Health Sciences were the most prevalent in the findings, including critical fields such as computer science and cancer research. The most common connected keywords from 2011–2016 were primarily biomedical, including cells , cell , and cancer . This switched towards computer science from 2021–2024, with common keywords such as model , data , and algorithm. Relatively few paper mill papers were found in the social sciences or humanities. Given the growth of the threat to the integrity of science, especially within the medical fields and with added AI availability, the results join the chorus of concerns calling for more research on paper mills across academic publishing.

This paper investigates research misconduct in Asia within the realm of higher education (HE) research by analysing 283 articles that were retracted from international peer‐reviewed journals from their inception through 2024. The study identified the primary reason for retraction as paper mill, followed by violation of research ethics and manipulation of the peer‐review process. On average, these papers got retracted after one year of publication. Most retracted articles were contributed by China and published in a small number of Q3 journals. The findings of this study enhance the HE research community's understanding of the scale of retraction in Asia, with the goal of raising awareness and establishing more robust mechanisms for monitoring the publication process.

This study examines the effectiveness of content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in primary school English teaching, focusing its impact on the English learning ability and interest of lower-grade students. Two hundred and forty first-grade students were selected from three primary schools in Shenzhen (115 in the experimental group and 125 in the control group) for a one-week intervention. Results showed that students in the experimental group significantly outperformed those in the control group in terms of English learning ability, maintaining a stable advantage across three tests. Additionally, the experimental group’s learning interest increased significantly from pre-test to post-test, whereas the control group remained stable. Moderation effect analysis indicated that students with initially low interest levels in the pre-test experienced the most significant increase in learning interest after the intervention. The research findings demonstrate that CLIL can effectively enhance primary school students’ English learning ability and interest in learning English, with particularly significant transformative effects for students who initially showed low interest. This study provides preliminary empirical evidence for implementing CLIL in China’s primary education context.

Hong Kong (HK) has been frequently studied in higher education (HE) policy research, but almost none shed light on policies related to the university student hostels. This study is unique as it focuses on university residential education in HK, which has a history of adopting the Oxbridge residential model, but in an Asian context. By tracing the policy development of university student hostels from 1980 to 2020 (a 40-year period), several themes were observed according to the year, ranging from financing hostel construction, defining the purpose of student housing, balancing the ratio of local and non-local students, to promoting internationalization in a localized context in recent years. Compared with the student housing development trend in the UK, the author deduces that the government’s decision to either offer public student hostels or outsource to the private sector will have a considerable impact on the educational role of student hostels. This study emphasizes that residential education must be intentional and suggests that universities should emphasize it as an essential part of higher education.