A prominent scientific publisher’s announcement last week that it was retracting 64 articles for false peer reviews made globalheadlines – yet it is the authors’ identity that is causing a stir in China.

Nearly all of the 64 papers appear to have been authored by Chinese academics, based on a search for the retracted articles on the publisher Springer’s website. The articles were published in journals on neurobiology, cancer research, biochemistry and other scientific topics and were written by academics based in a dozen Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang and Harbin.

In its statement last week, the Berlin-based publisher announced that the 64 articles were “being retracted from 10 Springer subscription journals, after editorial checks spotted fake email addresses, and subsequent internal investigations uncovered fabricated peer review reports.” The announcement did not name the articles or their authors.

It was only after China’s official Xinhua News Agency ran a story on the retractions that public attention turned to the academics’ identities. “From published information, the vast majority of the authors are from China,” Xinhua wrote in the article, which appeared only on its Chinese-language wire.

William Curtis, executive vice-president for publishing, medicine and biomedicine at Springer, told China Real Time in a statement that the retractions “do not offer a representative picture of the quality and ground-breaking research being published by researchers in China.”

“These retracted articles represent less than 0.05% of submissions that Springer received from Chinese authors in the last year,” Mr. Curtis said. “The journals where these retracted articles were published have published many sound articles from institutions in China in recent months.”

The move follows a similar case in March in which the U.K.-based publisher BioMed Central retracted 43 articles for false peer reviews. Most of the articles’ authors were based in China.

After the latest incident, news of the retractions quickly spurred debate in China, with some users of the country’s social networking sites questioning whether the incident was reflective of bigger problems within China’s academic sphere.

“I believe the problem lies in the system,” wrote one user of China’s Weibo microblogs. “Academics’ professional rank and title largely depend on the quantity of papers they publish, which can also decide their salary. Nobody cares about how they teach or how much research they’ve done.”

“In China, people are fine in elementary and middle school – it’s only once they reach college that they begin to get involved in corruption, be it spiritual, academic or economic,” another user opined.

Experts say the case is part of what is fast becoming a worrying trend involving the systemic faking of the peer review process – although they caution that the development is not limited to China.

“Peer review is a system that is often attacked because people wonder what it actually contributes to the quality of the paper. It is really the best system that we have, but it is totally based on trust,” said Charlotte Haug, vice-chair of the U.K.-registered Committee on Publication Ethics. “So, this is a big breach of trust that these are actually independent experts reviewing the paper in question.”

Many scientists, particularly non-native English speakers, turn to third-party firms to help them publish their papers, Dr. Haug noted. But sometimes, those firms offer services that go beyond language polishing and may include the creation of false identities for peer reviews.

“We don’t think that Chinese researchers are any worse than anybody else. But what we know is that the pressure to publish — for example in Western journals — is enormous in China,” Dr. Haug said.

“There is a spectrum here from legitimately wanting some help to getting the same opportunities as people who have English as their first language, for example,” she added. “But this is a whole business that needs to be watched really, really carefully. Otherwise, the whole system gets corrupted.”

Over the past three years, 250 papers have been retracted for fake peer review, according to Ivan Oransky, a medical journalist and co-founder of the Retraction Watch blog.

While articles by authors based in mainland China and Taiwan represent more than half of that total, Mr. Oransky said, the problem spans countries including Iran, Pakistan and South Korea – and often, the academic rewards in those countries for getting published play an outsize role.

“The incentives around the world are not great; they really reward publishing papers in top journals above everything else,” Mr. Oransky said. “But in China, many scientists will get a half-salary or even full-salary bonus for publishing in prestigious journals. So you can imagine that would be a pretty serious perverse incentive."

--Felicia Sonmez, with contributions by Hu Xin. Follow Felicia on Twitter @feliciasonmez.

(Update: This post has been updated to correct Dr. Haug's title and clarify that the Committee on Publication Ethics is a U.K.-registered organization.)