India tops in academic fraud

A working paper by Prof T A Abinandanan from the Indian Institute of Science on scientific misconduct in India finds that misconduct rates have risen from 10 per 100,000 papers in 1991-2000 to 44 per 100,000 papers in the decade 2001-10.

Abinandanan’s study looks at papers retracted by journals over the past few years. It found that for the 2001-10 period, 70 papers out of 103,434 papers published from India have been retracted.

Of the 70 retracted papers, 45 papers were attributed to some form of plagiarism—23 for text plagiarism, 18 for self plagiarism, and 3 for data plagiarism. The 45 papers involve a large number of scientists from some of the best institutes in the country. “The 45 retracted papers from India had over 130 authors; and 12 authors had at least three(overlapping) retractions due to misconduct,” the paper notes.

Moreover, the researchers behind misconduct-laden papers are not only from lower-tier institutions, but also from some top institutions in India, including CSIR Labs, DBT Labs, Banares Hindu University, Postgraduate Institute for Medical Education and Research, and IIT-Kanpur.

Just last week, Kalasalingam University in Tamil Nadu fired a professor and revoked the registration of six students last week for data manipulation.

Scientific misconduct has been an issue of concern in the past few years. An analysis posted on the Nature journal’s blog (Richard Van Noorden and Bob O’Hara) found that India had the highest fraud rate in the world—18 papers of 100,000. This is far higher than those for China (11), South Korea(9), the US (5), Japan(5), the UK(2), and Germany(1).

However, Abinandanan hopes that the situation is likely to improve as there has been a drop in the number of reported cases since 2007.

“This steep drop may be due to the real reduction in the number of misconduct cases. A more plausible reason is the increasing use of plagiarism detection software by an ever increasing number of journals,” he notes.

Shamed nations

Retraction rate for countries per 100,000 papers

Country               Rate

UK                        13
USA                      14
Japan                   16
World                   17
South Korea         44
China                   48
India                    68
India(*)                44

(*) - Misconduct rate
Source: blogs.nature.­com/boboh