(27 Jan 2026) Over the past decade, Hindawi expanded rapidly from a small open access (OA) publisher into a large, multi-journal operation publishing tens of thousands of articles annually. This period of growth coincided with an increase in submissions later linked to paper mills. By 2023–2024, public reporting documented that more than 8,000 articles across a…
(26 Nov 2025) In line with China’s emphasis on research integrity, the Ministry of Science and Technology and relevant departments have launched a special campaign to crack down on misconduct in academic papers, according to an announcement issued Wednesday on the ministry’s official WeChat account. The campaign primarily targets retracted papers published by Chinese scholars…
(17 Nov 2025) More than 200 academic papers in South Korea have been retracted over suspicions that artificial intelligence was improperly used to reproduce content from ChatGPT. Following a series of AI-assisted cheating cases at major universities, including Seoul National University, the recent confirmation of widespread AI-assisted paper-writing allegations has raised concerns about an emerging…
(31 Oct 2025) In Iraq, where science has been struggling for many years and corruption is widespread, international praise carries extra weight. Many awardees were quick to trumpet their achievement online. As the University of Technology – Iraq, which won the “Distinguished University Award” among public institutions, stated on its website, “Clarivate is a reputable research institution that grants high credibility to research…
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large language model–based chatbot ChatGPT fails to highlight the validity concerns with scientific papers that have been retracted or have been the subject of other editorial notices, according to a new study.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…
(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. …
From 2025 (2024 data), citations to and from retracted articles will no longer contribute towards the Journal Impact Factor. (15 May 2025) From Clarivate: “Citations to and from retracted content need to be treated with caution. Currently, retracted articles represent only a tiny fraction of the scholarly record; in the Web of Science Core…
(2 Apr 2025) Plagiarism, along with fabrication, data manipulation and other misdeeds, is considered to be one of the biggest sins an academic researcher can commit. As such, it makes sense that journals, editors and others overseeing scholarly publishing take plagiarism very seriously. They have protocols in place for receiving plagiarism complaints and investigating allegations…