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…
Browsing Category
Understanding Ethics
Resourceful articles on research and publication ethics
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?
You can also listen to this article as an audio recording.
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…
Zooming Into Retractions: Understanding the global trends and proposing solutions
The number of research retractions has grown markedly over the past two decades. A recent study findings indicate that retractions for European biomedical science papers have…
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…
Spotting the Fakes: Understanding the common types of image manipulation in biological research
Images serve as visual evidence in biological research that help researchers validate their experimental findings. They also enable others in the field to reproduce the studies,…
How Should You Report Scientific Misconduct?
The number of retracted papers has increased considerably during the last few years and the reasons for these retractions are many. In some cases, the manuscripts had to be…