(30 Sep 2025) Several universities have given up using software to detect the use of Artificial Intelligence in student work. Massey University made the decision recently, and Auckland and Victoria University also did not use it. For Massey, it followed a decision to stop using automated systems to monitor for cheating in online exams after a major…
(11 Sept 2025) The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) has released new retraction guidelines designed to address growing challenges such as paper mill activity, fraudulent authorship, and undeclared third-party involvement. The new framework specifies that journals should retract work when authorship cannot be verified, when accountability is uncertain, or when any form of misrepresentation—including deception, fraud (e.g., a…
(8 Sept 2025) Earlier this year, China’s supreme court said companies selling fake or low-quality research papers should be punished. But shady middlemen there continue to offer questionable deals to journal editors across the globe in a bid to secure publications for their customers, emails obtained by Retraction Watch suggest. In the emails, sent between May and…
Study finds the chatbot doesn’t acknowledge concerns with problematic studies (15 Aug 2025) The large language model–based chatbot ChatGPT fails to highlight the validity concerns with scientific papers that have been retracted or have been the subject of other editorial notices, according to a new study. The analysis, published by Learned Publishing on Aug. 4, examines whether…
(21 Aug 2025) The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India and Springer Nature have announced a collaboration aimed at strengthening awareness of research integrity, open access, and evolving scholarly publishing practices across India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 academic institutions. The partnership is anchored in the RISE-UTTHAN initiative, an academic engagement…
The number of tools available to help library staff identify potential research misconduct is rapidly expanding. Here are some recommendations. (7 Aug 2025) The management of open access agreements within academic libraries creates the possibility for library staff to play a new role in the ongoing publishing integrity crisis. When library staff monitor open…
Researchers uncover strategies used by academicians to publish fraudulent research (5 Aug 2025) An organized underground network of individuals and groups is enabling fraudulent research and increasingly undermining the integrity of science, an alarming new study warns. Researchers from Northwestern University in the US conducted a large-scale data analysis of scientific literature and found that sophisticated global networks…
(29 Jul 2025) Frontiers Research Integrity Auditing team has uncovered a network of authors and editors who conducted peer review with undisclosed conflicts of interest and who have engaged in citation manipulation. The unethical actions of this network have been confirmed in 122 articles published in Frontiers, across 5 journals, and has led to their…
(1 Aug 2025) India’s national university ranking will start penalizing institutions if a sizeable number of papers published by their researchers are retracted — a first for an institutional ranking system. The move is an attempt by the government to address the country’s growing number of retractions due to misconduct. Many retractions correct honest mistakes in…
(22 Jul 2025) A new research integrity risk index, which listed several of the country’s top universities as being at ‘high risk’ of systemic breaches of research integrity, has sparked a warning to universities from Indonesia’s Ministry of Higher Education and Science, calling on them to step up research integrity and improve research quality. …