(8 Jul 2026) Indonesian authorities are widening their investigation into a case of suspected identity and research fraud at an overseas medical conference, which has exposed gaps in academic oversight and revived concerns about abuses in the nation’s system of publication-driven promotion for academia. The Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology has set up a…
(8 Oct 2025) Two major publishers have begun to automatically reject the vast majority of papers based on public health data sets, following revelations that unscrupulous actors use these data sets to churn out nonsense scientific papers. Last month, PLOS and Frontiers both announced submissions that use data sets such as the U.S. Centers for Disease…
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…
(4 Jul 2025) Researchers from major universities, including Waseda University in Tokyo, have been found to have inserted secret prompts in their papers so artificial intelligence-aided reviewers will give them positive feedback. The revelation, first reported by Nikkei this week, raises serious concerns about the integrity of the research in the papers and highlights flaws…
(8 Nov 2023) Elisabeth Bik has made a career of being a data vigilante. What should mainstream scientific journals learn from her? Vox talked with Bik about her work, but also discussed what academic journals should do to make sure these problems aren’t published in the first place. Read the article in full…
Only a small fraction of research misconduct ever comes to light. Independent investigative bodies could remedy that. (11 Aug 2020) From Nature Index: Only a small fraction of research misconduct ever comes to light. What’s more, many commonplace research misbehaviors are categorized as questionable research practices (QRPs) rather than outright misconduct. That includes publication bias, where scholarly…
(18 Jul 2019) Want to be a first author on a scholarly paper? A Russian company has you covered — starting at about $500. The company claims to have added the names of more than 10,000 researchers to more than 2,000 published articles in scholarly journals over the past three years. Think eBay — or…
(5 November 2018) The spate of high-profile cases of fraudulent publications has revealed a widening replication, or outright deception, crisis in the social sciences. To Marc Spooner, researchers “cooking up” findings and the deliberate faking of science is a result of extreme pressures to publish, brought about by an increasingly pervasive audit culture within the…
(29 January 2018) Some 82 cases of professors listing their secondary school offspring as co-authors in academic papers have been unearthed by an investigation by South Korea’s ministry of education, writes Aimee Chung. The discovery has prompted referrals to ethics committees at 29 universities – including some of the country’s top institutions – where the…
(7 April 2015) “The idealised view of science as the curiosity-driven pursuit of knowledge to understand and improve the world around us has been tarnished,” write Scott Edmunds and Rob Davidson. “Recent news tells of systematic fraud and mass retraction of research papers from the Chinese academic system, and allegations of attempts to game the…