Retractions and Predatory Journals: A growing crisis
Maintaining research integrity and public trust in research has become increasingly challenging due to the surge in retracted studies and the unchecked growth of predatory…
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Understanding Ethics
Resourceful articles on research and publication ethics
ICMJE Updates 2025: A new era for ethical research publishing
The integrity of medical and scientific publications is crucial for ensuring the reliability of research findings. Historically known as the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts,…
The Never Ending Debate on Sci-Hub: Balancing access, ethics, and sustainability in scholarly publishing
Sci-Hub, often described as the ‘Robin Hood of research,’ is a scholarly piracy website allowing users to access millions of academic papers that are often blocked behind the…
When Should a Paper Be Retracted?
Retractions send a clear message that the validity of the paper has been brought into question. The fellow researchers who may be citing that paper, or even worse, moving forward…
Most Effective Deterrent for Scientific Misconduct
Misconduct: A Question of Intent
If we consider the top three categories of scientific misconduct to be, in ascending order, the use of someone else’s work without citation…
10 Types of Scientific Misconduct
Behavior that would be considered scientific misconduct could occur at all points in a research protocol. You could encounter different types of scientific research misconduct at…
Academic Research Misconduct: Spotlight on duplicate publications and simultaneous submissions
Simultaneous submissions and duplicate publications are considered unethical in scientific disciplines. With some exceptions (explained below), most journals do not accept a…
Should the Academic Community Trust Plagiarism Detectors?
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Academic integrity is a serious issue in the research community. It ensures that the scientists remain dedicated…
Common Types of Plagiarism
Plagiarism, or passing someone else’s work as your own, is not a new phenomenon in research. It has gained greater attention with the advent of plagiarism check tools that have…
Growing Threat of Image Manipulation: Historic cases of retractions due to image fraud
Dr. Alan Fisher knew his team’s research had immense potential. After months of tireless work, they finally achieved groundbreaking results. However, as he reviewed the images in…
Citation-based Plagiarism Detector: New citation software tool hunts for plagiarism
Plagiarism is a serious issue in higher education and in academic publishing and at times can be difficult to identify. The deliberate misrepresentation of one’s written work by…
Self-plagiarism: How Much Is Too Much?
Most researchers would say that plagiarism is never acceptable. They would probably also agree that some types of plagiarism are more serious than others. For example, complete…