Chinese authorities are cracking down on academic fraud after an international medical journal retracted 107 Chinese-authored papers from the past five years, in the biggest case to date of fake peer reviews to endorse research.

Springer, publisher of the journal Tumor Biology, said the retractions were made because the peer review process — in which an independent academic recommends a paper for publication — had been “deliberately compromised by fabricated peer reviewer reports”.

China’s ministry of science and technology said this week that the incident had “seriously harmed the international reputation of our country's scientific research and the dignity of Chinese scientists at large”. It vowed a “no tolerance” approach to academic fraud.