The ethical governance of scientific and technical papers is an important part of the ethical governance system of science and technology. The scientific research involved in a paper should comply with the ethical norms of science and technology, conform to ethical review procedures, and satisfy informed consent and privacy protection. In this paper, we used the information of Retraction Watch Database to collect cases of retracted papers in international scientific and technical journals due to ethical issues, and manually reviewed the reasons for retraction to select those papers that were indeed retracted due to the violation of scientific and technical ethical norms. We analyzed the retracted papers in terms of their publication date, retraction time, subject area, and country, and explored the patterns and characteristics. For the subject areas to which the papers belonged, more than 90% of the papers were in the field of biomedical research. Based on the reasons for retraction marked in the database and the specific descriptions in the retraction notices, we refined the classification of the reasons for retraction, including 17 aspects in three categories, such as violation of ethical review, informed consent, and ethical consensus norms, and then summarized the common problems involving ethics in scientific and technical papers, wishing to alert researchers and provide reference for the governance of scientific and technical ethics. At the same time, based on the analysis result in this paper, we conclude that since 2000, the number of papers retracted due to ethical issues began to appear and gradually increased, reflecting the increased ethical awareness of the scientific community and the increased concern of the ethical compliance of the scientific research activities involved in the papers. China ranks third in the world in the number of papers retracted due to ethical issues with a total of 92 papers. Comparing the retraction rates of papers due to ethical issues in China and the United States between 2011 and 2020, we also found that the rate is higher in China. The ethical governance of science and technology involves many complex factors such as social culture, regulations and policies, and scientific research integrity, etc. From this paper, we found that the failure to obtain prior approval from the ethics committee for relevant research is the most important reason for paper retractions, so the entry point of work is to strengthen the standardized ethical review of scientific and technological activities. In addition, we suggest that China needs to strengthen ethical research, raise ethical awareness, and popularize ethics education in order to actively participate in international ethical governance. Finally, actions in scientific research activities that are contrary to the ethical norms of science and technology should be investigated and handled in accordance with the relevant regulations.
