Malpractice in Indian Academia
Indian recently became the third largest producer of scientific articles in the world.
It a notable achievement for the world’s fifth largest economy.
But behind the barrage of research papers lies a telling statistic that should be a considerable cause for concern to Indian academia
Published papers are retracted when they are found to have mistakes, and retractions remove them from the scientific literature.
In many instances, papers are also retracted when they are found to contain data or claims produced as a result of misconduct.
Historically, a very small fraction of scientific misconduct has been caught.
The Retraction Watch database lists 109 reasons for which papers have been retracted.
The reasons can be grouped into three categories:
Grave reasons (constituting serious breach of academic and scientific integrity)
Misconduct (wherein the author knowingly indulged in misconduct)
Manipulation of results using computer-generated content; and errors (errors in the article, which can also indicate hasty publication)
The data show that the number of retractions in India rose dramatically in 2020-2022.
To understand the effects of a higher research output on the number of retractions, consider the ratio of the former to the latter.
As a proxy for quality it indicates an alarming drop in the country – almost halving.
As for the domains of retractions, engineering accounts for almost 48% of all cases, up from 36% in 2017-2019, while the humanities grew by 567%.
Science itself appears to be relatively untouched by this phenomenon.
The results of a small survey conducted by India Research Watchdog with 364 respondents.
A little more than half believe that university ranking parameters are behind the rise.
Another 35% attributed it to unethical researchers, while 10% pointed to the minimal action taken when an allegation is reported or when an offender is ‘caught’.
There are other factors as well, including making it compulsory for PhD students to publish papers (a change instituted in 2017), as a result forcing those unable to do so to resort to low-quality publications, and the proliferation of predatory journals.
The data should be an urgent call to action to scrutinise research malpractice in Indian academia.
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