A review of the current concerns about misconduct in medical sciences publications and the consequences

Abstract

Background

In the new era of publication, scientific misconduct has become a focus of concern including extreme variability of plagiarism, falsification, fabrication, authorship issues, peer review manipulation, etc. Along with, overarching theme of “retraction” and “predatory journals” have emphasized the importance of studying related infrastructures.

Methods

Information used in this review was provided through accessing various databases as Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Nature Index, Publication Ethics and Retraction Watch. Original researches, expert opinions, comments, letters, editorials, books mostly published between 2010 and 2020 were gathered and categorized into three sections of “Common types of misconduct”,” Reasons behind scientific misconduct” and “Consequences”. Within each part, remarkable examples from the past 10 years cited in Retraction Watch are indicated. At last, possible solution on combating misconduct are suggested.

Results

The number of publications are on the dramatic rise fostering a competition under which scholars are pushed to publish more. Consequently, due to several reasons including poor linguistic and illustration skills, not adequate evaluation, limited experience, etc. researchers might tend toward misbehavior endangering the health facts and ultimately, eroding country, journal/publisher, and perpetrator’s creditability. The reported incident seems to be enhanced by the emergence of predatory with publishing about 8 times more papers in 2014 than which is in 2010. So that today, 65.3% of paper retraction is solely attributing to misconduct, with plagiarism at the forefront. As well, authorship issues and peer-review manipulation are found to have significant contribution besides further types of misconduct in this duration.

Conclusion

Given the expansion of the academic competitive environment and with the increase in research misconduct, the role of any regulatory sector, including universities, journals/publishers, government, etc. in preventing this phenomenon must be fully focused and fundamental alternation should be implemented in this regard.

Introduction

Over the past decade, the total documentation of solely 233 top global countries contained in Scopus database has increased from 2,771,765 in 2010 to approximately 4 million in 2018 according to SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) [1] . Along with, a trend of “hyper authorship” or “mass authorship”, writing articles with more than 1000 co-authors, have increased about 2-fold over five past years [2]. These increments, more than other factors, is attributable to the significant rise in the number of universities, researchers and accordingly fostering a hypercompetitive environment in which publishing more articles or having higher metrics are told to be the only way of being successful. While it can be said that such atmosphere is beneficial for science growth, one must always keep in mind what are the detrimental consequences if there is improper academic evaluation; for instance easier entrance exam, inadequate supervision on professors performance, and paying more attention to personal desires including gaining scholarships, grants, carrier promotion, fame, and monetary benefits [3, 4]. Going one step further, the undue attention to bibliometric used globally fosters this atmosphere within exerting unintended effects from negligible academic bullying (insulting, mistreating, embracing, humiliating) to more notably holding a place in employing or promoting professors because of higher metrics indices or pushing students to publish more articles deprived of practical application [5, 6]. Indeed, today’s development of such questionable criteria may be rooted from lower academic levels where the precedence over average/scores for decision making or rewarding, teach students to cheat or make teachers to not anymore focus on the final goal of improving students’ knowledge [7]. So, it is not surprising then that lack of researcher’s knowledge from early stages, coupled with high academic pressure and innate desire to be outrank ultimately become a bullet firing research integrity and resultantly exerting detrimental effects of unethical principles so called “scientific misconduct” or “research fraudulence”. Existence of scientific misconduct in the field of medical sciences has shown to inflict very severe blows to the individual and public health; highlighting the immediate need of solution finding.

Thus, to help out meeting this challenge, this article begins with giving the definition and more recent types of research misconduct at the current, followed by providing a complete explanation on both reasons and consequences through remarkable examples and lastly offering possible solutions by addressing globally accepted guidelines. As far as we know, there is no similar study in the past decade with categorizing the contributory factors and outcomes in a detailed way. This is the first study in its kind focusing on the most recent top cases of misconduct, all can be served as a lesson for current researchers and be valuable to secure the future of research integrity.

Methods

Information used in this review was provided through accessing various databases as Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, Nature Index, Publication Ethics and Retraction Watch. Searched terms mostly include “Scientific Misconduct”, “Misconduct in Research”, “Types of Misconduct in Research”, “Consequences of Scientific Misconduct”, “Global Burden of Publications and Misconduct” and many others. Original researches, expert opinions, comments, letters, editorials, books mostly published between 2010 and 2020 were also gathered and addressed.

Misconduct and common types

Scientific misconduct is a growing phenomenon defined as “fabrication, falsification or plagiarism in proposing, performing or reviewing research or in reporting research” according to the US Office of Research Integrity. By the other terms, the types of misconduct are, but not limited to, “FFP” standing for fabrication (reporting non-observed results), falsification (manipulating data or material) and plagiarism (the act of utilizing someone else’s statement, idea, methods or results without permission) [8, 9] including salami-slicing, picture manipulation, self-plagiarism and text recycling; all defined in Table 1. As an example, in 2019, plagiarism detection company disclosed that of about 4 million Russian-language studies, 70,000 were republished from 2 to 17 times, mostly owing to self-plagiarism [10].

Table 1.

Most common types of research misconduct

Types of Scientific Misconduct		Definition [9, 22]
Fabrication	Forging/Dry-labbing	Not only producing data but also including the description of non-performed experiment
	Issues on references	Using fake or unrelated references
Falsification	Trimming	Removing data irregularity to make it more convincible
	Cooking/Suppression	Just reporting supporting outcomes to the hypothesis
Plagiarism	Cloning	Copying one’s else work word by word and submitting it
	Ctrl-c	Copying text from single source without any changes
	Find-replace	Just changing key words/phrases
	Remix	Rephrasing and combining sentences from multiple source
	Recycle	Borrowing generously from the writer’s previous work without citation.
	Citation cartel	Group of researchers/colleagues usually in the same field who cite each other’s works overly collegial reasons or to achieve higher metrics
	Hybrid	Combining and copying cited sources without providing citations
	Mash-up	Mixing copied material from multiple sources
	Eror-404	Citing to non-existent or inaccurate sources
	Aggregator	Paper contains no original work however the citation is proper
	Retweet	Containing to much text from the original however the citation is proper
	Picture/Figure manipulation	Combining images, cropping non-related parts, changing brightness or contrast, fully copying an image
	Shotgunning	Simultaneous submission of the same research article to multiple journals
	Salami slicing	Publishing many single research articles in order to improve metrics although they all could be combined in one larger study
	Templating	Fully copying structure, format and phrases from another published article
Authorship Issues	Gift Authorship	Including one’s name for future counter-gift e.g. increasing collaboration
	Guest Authorship	Abusing the name of famous researcher to increase the chance of publishing in top journals
	Ghost Authorship	-Including one’s name who has few/no collaboration -Removing one’s name from the list of authors despite being contributed
	Coercion Authorship	Superiors request including their name if the article is originated through their department
Peer Review Issues and Manipulation	Bias (gender/ regional discrimination)
	Providing dishonest review comments
	Stealing rejected papers and republishing them
	Using fake referee’s report or third party to obtain a favorable review

More broadly, other types of misconduct i.e. authorship issues mainly “Guest Authorship”,“Gift Authorship” and “Ghost Authorship” and peer review manipulation have undergone a substantial expansion in developing and sanctioned countries possibly due the to restriction in publication [8]. In 2015, Springer Nature retracted 58 papers all containing authorship issues and peer review manipulation and 70% of which were due to plagiarism. The same experiment by BioMed Central revealed that peer-review manipulation accounted for 57%, plagiarism for 93% and authorship manipulation was a reason for all of retractions [11]. In the respect of authorship issues, ghost authorship is indicated in two different ways; first, senior researchers list those who had little or no cooperation with main author, like cases reported from the South Korea who write the name of the school-aged children as co-authors to increase the chance of university admissions [3, 12, 13]. Second, removing one’s name from the list of authors despite being contributed [14]. Guest authorship is also about fraudsters who abuse the name of famous researcher as co-author or corresponding author with the aim of increasing the chance of publication while the researcher has had no contribution [15]. As a report, a group of researchers did fake submission through using the prominent Dutch economist to ease acceptance. Interestingly, after questioning the editors, his name was removed in manuscript revision, saying he no longer wants to be among the author, however this attempt failed and the article was retracted due to the issue of guest authorship [16].

Compromising of peer-review integrity is of another type that has been coming to the fore in recent years. In 2012, a group of researchers used fake Elsevier Editorial System (EES) account, created a positive report from a fictional well-known referee hence mislead the editor [17]. Similar to this, a researcher lost 24 of his paper solely due to using fake email address and doing his own peer-review [18]. In 2015, BioMed Central (BMC) also removed 43 papers for fake reviews, mostly conducted by third party agencies providing fabricated details of potential peer-reviewers [19].

Unfortunately, greed for fame causes some peer reviewer to reject manuscript, steal and republish them under their own name. For instance, a submitted manuscript to Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP) that was under review for about 13 months with final rejection, was thoroughly plagiarized and republished days after by reviewer of the rejected manuscript, which is about peer review manipulation [20].

Bias, gender discrimination in particular, is another today’s issue on peer review process affecting submissions by female as corresponding author/first author to be more rejected even without providing peer review; which is revealed by the institute of physic (IOP) and the journal eLife, although it is hard to believe. One more analysis in 2018 by Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) also demonstrated that 25.6% and 34.2% of all rejected papers without peer review are one’s submitted by women as corresponding author or first author in respect [21]. Of note, in the current era with political issues, regional bias exists as well which makes some peer reviewers to not handle manuscript from sanctioned countries. This concern will be more discussed in the following section.

Reasons behind scientific misconduct

Main reasons: “Publish or Perish” and “A Gap in Knowledge”

Today we face with the avalanche of admissions to university, growing number of researchers and resultantly the added pressure on academic environment, all strongly emphasize the contribution of the traditional culture of “publish or perish” in misconduct. Publish or Perish means there is a high pressure on scholars desiring for success to publish more articles in a very short duration otherwise there is no place for them in the academic competitive environment. One influential factor in this extent is the importance of articles quantity and metrics rather than quality in nowadays research which has made publishing compulsory. For instance, sometimes we see somebody publishes several articles just in a month or students aiming to secure their position/improve their CVs, rather than paying attention to effective learning, waste more time writing worthlessness articles [5]. Then, what could be the reason and outcomes of these except that one has violated authorship issues or will employ misconduct? [23, 24]

Besides the culture of Publish or Perish, there is another reason behind scientific misconduct with the rapid advent which is the issue of “A Gap in Knowledge” appearing either in the shape of lacking linguistic, illustration or scientific skills.

On the other terms, some researchers, mostly undergraduates, often insist on authoring more papers so as to add a line to their CVs and obtain scholarships. However, in some cases, they may generally lack enough scientific and lingual information which could be later problematic and cause misinterpretation [8]. The recent incident occurs more in developing countries including China, Malaysia, Mexico, Taiwan, and Pakistan according to reports [8, 25]. As a main reason, non-native-English-speaking authors are contributing who might misunderstand the subject, thus either declare mistaken perception or copy the statements without having permission or including references. Moreover, the challenge of “linguistic interference” and/or “poor illustration skills” that are rooted from not passing the relevant courses, place major restriction on authors asked to write review articles or editorials by way of expressing the similar idea in different words [26]. By the same token, the abuse of the language differences, may end in additional fraudulence where a researcher translate non-English texts (for example especially Chinese) into English and republish under his/her own names [4].

Other reasons

Senior researchers

The reasons behind scientific misconduct are not limited to reported factors as it can attribute to masters whom themselves carry out unreliable studies and/or persuade others into it.

In this respect, the matter of “bias” causes some supervisors to compare their student’s results with prior successful ones and lay the blame if they are not encouraging enough. Thus the intention to publish more along with fear of blame, make academics start data alternation and selectively report the supporting outcomes which is referred to as “cooking” or “suppression” [9]. Here, authorship issues, guest authorship in particular, may also be raised when supervisors don’t devote adequate energy and time to the work under their direction and set early researchers to do it alone [23]. Aside from, high pressure in academic environment may lead masters to get more exhausted, frustrated and greedy for carrier promotion and research grants accompanied by higher metrics (i.e. number of articles, citations, etc.). The lack of proper monitoring or available working reports, then, let masters easily employ academic bullying like insulting, mistreating, embracing and humiliating, altogether result in a sense of fear particularly among undergraduates and push them toward unethical principles to gain satisfactory outcomes [6]. Quite the reverse, there are supervisors who find punishing and exposing offenses contrary to ethical values and always offer fraudsters forgiveness. This exemplary behavior, rooting from the cultural belief, not allows the wrongdoer to learn from his/her mistake, hence one may continue doing unethical principles [23].

Journals

Digital publishing is of another aspect of provoking misconduct where profitable individuals take every opportunities and start predatory printing to set researchers (esp. undergraduates) up [4]. These fraudsters, at the expense of the authors (called article processing charges, or APCs) print articles in fake journals without necessary proper checking the quality and not providing edition services [4, 27–30]. A study in 2017 suggested that some journals are willing to include the names of researchers seeking for a carrier promotion in manuscript revisions for a fee and by paying more, researchers can even be introduced as a journal editor [31, 32]. Nevertheless, a very recent research on 250 predatory journals implied that although the amount of papers published in predatory journals have increased about 8 times within 2010 to 2014, they seem to barely question the accuracy of research. Forasmuch as 59.6% of papers published in such journals have no citation and just around 2.8% cited more than 11 times limited to 32 citation at most [33].

Along with fake publication, fraudsters sometimes start naming their journals under the deceptive titles like “international” or “world” [4] or manipulating journal impact factor (IF) through exploiting excessive “self-citation” or planned citations from sister journals [9, 34]. As well, some invalid journals only publish articles containing positive outcomes [27] or that are in the title of “novel” so that researchers are forced to report negative data and employ suppression. Taking collectively, after a short while, obscure journals will reach to an upper position, even around 18 ranks [9], and get a lot of attention despite including nonscientific content.

Political issues and sanctions

Last but not least, the influence of strict political sanctions on science and technology progress is the other concern that must be specifically focused nowadays. With looking back through the history, in 1965, boycott on South Africa affected almost 57% of academics destroying the chance of manuscript submission, global collaboration, and access to database [35]. Similarly, an almost-total financial and trade sanctions to the Iraqi republic during 1990–2003 posed many problems for providing drugs, medical equipment, accessing to medical journals, and textbooks and more importantly it prevented diplomas and graduates form continuing their education [36, 37]. Aforesaid conditions made by the US against Iran, drastically affect science for instance through limiting the collaboration of scientists in two countries [23, 38, 39] that may drive some unexperienced researchers to be trapped by predatory journals [40].

Sometimes, publishers/editors/reviewers may disapprove handling articles from sanctioned countries and review the author rather than the article. Albeit, such discrimination is banned as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) emphasized “Editorial decisions should not be affected by the origins of the manuscript, including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors. Decisions to edit and publish should not be determined by the policies of governments or other agencies outside of the journal itself.” [41]. Fortunately, some journals strongly decided to not allow the political matters affecting their scientific condition, so they continued usual collaboration with scientists in a very positive way [37, 40]. For instance, The Lancet declared “We are disappointed that some publishers have created the impression that work from Iran should be discriminated against. This attitude is contrary to the spirit and values of global science. We are currently working to deepen our relationship with Iranian medical and public health scientists, and we look forward to publishing the results of that collaboration, which, we hope, will include Iran’s Ministry of Health” [37] (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

The general overview on scientific misconduct including divisions and the main contributory reasons

Consequences

The point here is, although unethical implication is valuable for pushy researchers and self-interested journals, it can lead to far-reaching consequences whether on public health or on liable individual.

Effects on public health

The fact is when those working as a public health providers including nurses, pharmacists, doctors, dentists or some university masters, rather referring to more up-to-date articles than reading old textbooks, they gradually incorporate these new methods, medications and materials into treatment protocols. Then, if ambition or financial gain are prioritized and the patient is considered merely as a “customer”, both researchers [42] and even the world’s largest companies [26, 43] may endanger patients’ life and damage doctors’ confidence [27] through the act of processing worthless information and data alternation. For instance, the antidiabetic drug branded Avandia was abruptly withdrawn from markets in 2010 due to life-threatening side effects. A decade earlier in 1999, its severe cardiotoxicity was reported but the manufacturer refuted that claim and continued selling the drug [43–45]. In another published report, a sharp rise to the prevalence of measles, mumps, and rubella happened during 2002 due to a false assertion rooted from uncontrolled project design and small sample size (n = 12). In 1998, a group indicated that MMR vaccine may have severe adverse effects and cause autism in children hence prohibited doctors and parents from using this medicine [9, 42, 46, 47]. However, one of the authors later explained that at most 2 subjects had the reported autism-like symptoms whilst the article reported more supporting results about 8 out of 12 subjects [47].

Endangering public health can also be ascribed to the lack of oversight of the manufacturer and physician association. Based on the Rhee and Rhos recent study conducted through linking Medicare & Medicaid Services 2014–2016 Part D prescribing data to Open Payments data, manufacturer of the 3 branded Gabapentinoid allocated about $11.5 million funds (gifts, educational supports, travel costs, etc.) for 14.4% of all physicians prescribing any brand of this medicine despite it is proved to express safety concerns [48, 49].

Effects on perpetrator

Apart from social impact, employing misconduct, no matter what the kind is, generally threats both perpetrator’s credit and country reputation through introducing financial penalties [50], resulting in lengthy suspension from education [51] and work [52] and even throwing offender into prison [53] all just owing to “paper retraction”. Plethora of articles particularly ones in the field of medical sciences are now not accepted or blocked/retracted mostly due to the intentional misconduct instead of unintentional errors [9]. According to one descriptive study on 4,284,945 publications indexed in PubMed from January 1st, 2013- December 31st, 2016, 1082 of articles (at the rate of 2.5 per 10,000 publication) were retracted whereas 707 of retractions were solely due to an intentional misconduct (65.3%) [54]. Another comprehensive review by Nature publishing group confirmed the 10-fold rise in the number of retracted articles during 1977 and 2010 [55]. These statistics are emphasized once the number of authors increases. Put differently, articles with equal or more than 7 authors accounted for 33.3% of all retractions in the course of 2013 to 2016, highlighting the importance of “multiple authorship” in promoting dishonesty [12, 54]. Also, considering the share of each type of fraud in retraction, both aforesaid reports pointed to the plagiarism’s first place followed by falsification/fabrication, peer-review process, authors, and journal issues, respectively as you can see the recent most prominent examples of them in Table 2.

Table 2.

The recent most important retractions due to scientific misconduct and their consequences

Title of article	Published Year	Published Source	Types of Misconduct and Description	Consequences	Citation based on Web of Science	Year of Retraction/ References
Non-coding RNAome of RPE cells under oxidative stress suggests unknown regulative aspects of Retinitis pigmentosa etiopathogenesis	2018	Scientific Reports	Data Fabrication Researchers used an RNA-seq data set which was neither produced in their laboratory nor was accessible publicly.	The article was retracted.	5	2019 [56]
Image-based reversible data hiding algorithm toward big multimedia data	2018	Multimedia Tools and Applications	Plagiarism The author waited about 13 months for journal (MTAP) decision and finally the paper was rejected. Days after rejection, the same journal, publish the plagiarized version of the rejected article with different authors.	The article was retracted.	0	2018 [20, 57]
A new technique for extra peritoneal repair of inguinal hernia	2016	Journal of Surgical Research	Case Misinterpretation The researchers reported the inaccurate and misleading clinical information about patients. More than 500 of 1882 cases of hernia were hydrocele of tunica vaginalis and didn’t have hernia.	The article was retracted.	3	2019 [58]
Genetic Variants in DNA Double-Strand Break Repair Genes and Risk of Salivary Gland Carcinoma: A Case-Control Study	2015	PLoS One	Falsification The researcher claimed that the blood samples used in the study collected from 98 different subjects however all samples are just duplication of her own blood.	It affected two grant process and two papers.	4	2018 [59, 60]
Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterranean Diet	2013	New England Journal of Medicine	Bias and Falsification The article was retracted due to the uncontrolled design of study i.e. the randomization was not systematic. However, later in 2018 this article was corrected and republished in which the author mentioned the results n soften language instead.	The article was retracted.	2311	2018 [61, 62]
Integrative genomics identifies APOE e4 effectors in Alzheimer’s disease	2013	Nature	Falsification and Fabrication Figures, data and sample numbers were manipulated and not accurate in ELISA.	It affected two published papers.	102	2015 [63, 64]
Myostatin is a novel tumoral factor that induces cancer cachexia	2012	Journal of Biological Chemistry	Falsification Data falsification of Western Blot by the first author.	The fradulent author lost his PhD.	63	2016 [51, 65]
Eliciting broadly neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1 that target gp41 MPER	2012	Retrovirology	Falsification and fabrication Intentionally spiking rabbit sera with antibodies and report falsified data to develop a vaccine against HIV-1, also presented results in 7 national and international symposia, 3 grants application and many progress reports.	57 months sentence, Repay more than $7 Million to the US NIH three years of supervised release after prison.	1	2015 [50, 66]
A Pleiotropically Acting MicroRNA, miR-31, Inhibits Breast Cancer Metastasis	2009	Cell Press	Fabrication and Image Manipulation Combining data from different individual tests and report them as one controlled experiment and figures don’t accurately represent the original data.	The article was retracted.	652	2015 [67, 68]
Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children	1998	The Lancet	Several types of misconduct The small sample size (n = 12) uncontrolled design, intentionally using the selected samples and speculative nature of conclusion. Later, one of the authors claimed that just 6 of 12 samples had all the reported symptoms whereas 1998 article falsified this number to 8 of 12.	It might have influenced the outbreak of Measles, Mumps and Rubella in both UK and USA as many parents and doctors refused to use MMR vaccine.	1318	2010 [46, 47]

The table referred to 10 top retractions within past decade. All data were collected randomly through accessing Retraction Watch, Nature, The Lancet and other reported data bases and journals

What is important here is that due to lack of proper tools, there is always a difficulty in recognizing whether misconduct is conducted deliberately or deceptively which prolongs the time of decision, leads to misinformation for long period of time and the net effect is often inaction [69]. Even if the article is finally retracted, some journals refuse to reveal it, however they should put a watermark on it, according to COPE. Such shirking makes retracted articles to be cited over and over again while other researchers are not aware of the retraction, thus rapidly spread the false and misleading results; such as what happened on the case of Wakefield’s article. In 1998 Wakefield et al. reported the inaccurate results of the relation between MMR and autism in children found in 2010. According to references, this group did an uncontrolled experiment and eventually the paper was retracted after 12 years. Nonetheless, many researchers made reference to this study prior to retraction; byword, in 2002 another article entitled “Vaccine and Autism” was published in the Journal of Laboratory Medicine with emphasizing on the harmfulness of vaccination and referencing to that 1998 paper. Interestingly, although Wakefield’s article was pulled in 2010, editors of Lab Medicine did not retrieve it until 2018, when they first withdrew the article but later made the paper available with watermark [70, 71]. Indeed, excepting these not so minor conditions, there are also heavier fines worldwide.

At the reported case of drug Avandia, US authorities punished the manufacturer to pay $3bn; the highest settlement in pharmaceutical industry. Likewise, in 2009, another company got $2.3bn reprimand since it promoted the off-label use of four drugs branded Bextra, Geodon, Zyvox, Lyrica [4, 72]. It should also be kept in mind that, handling each research misconduct at the institutional level in the U.S carries a cost of approximately $525,000 and all cases annually costs over $110 million. Looking in more detail, during 1992 and 2012, $58 M funding from National Institute of Health had been dedicated to solely 291 misconduct-based retracted articles; each accounted for about $400,000 [7].

Discussion

Taken as a whole, the need for combating against research fraud remains unmet; the best way of which is to highly emphasize on quality-in-research rather than quantity. As an approach toward this, more research institutions, researchers, funding agencies, scientific communities and journals should stop decision-making based on metrics and adopt the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA), an aggregation provided in 2013 that invites all to reduce evaluation and consideration solely based on metrics.

Numerous infrastructures from academic institutions to government should also retain research integrity by way of providing specific policies and establishing additional regulatory agencies in countries with high rate of misconduct, China and USA included.

Among these, institutions and journals have an inseparable and reciprocal relationship that is not seriously considered in many regions. Universities and journals should have proper collaboration, fully answer relevant questions in the come up misconduct cases and not let wrong stuff get used to people’s lives and health.

In this extent, Universities are the only structures to watch academic environment plus creating healthy competition, making careful faculty’s evaluation and improving student’s scientific knowledge. They should always keep in mind that there are many parameters other than publication that can be additionally measured for the qualifying students to graduate. Thus, students should not be placed in the severe condition of pressure to publish for graduation as this might cause some to look for misconduct acts.

Journal editors and peer-reviewers must carry out close investigation into articles, thoroughly follow the guidelines and flowcharts of specially the COPE and not put any limitation on articles submitted by sanctioned countries. Retracted papers should be clearly marked, not removed and the journal ought to provide a “blacklist” of fraudsters who frequently employ misconduct. Documentation with multiple co-authors requires close inspection of each contributor details and could be published on the condition of fulfilling authorship criteria. To avoid manipulation of peer review system it is better for journals to turn off the automated system in which authors can provide the contact information of potential reviewers, as BMC did. Instead, authors can suggest potential reviewers in their cover letter. More procedures which institutions and journals are in charge for are available in Table 3.

Table 3.

Role of institutions and journals as first barriers to overcome scientific misconduct [45]

Institutions (e.g. Universities)		Journals and Peer Reviewers
Appointing a research integrity officer (or office) who doesn’t have any conflicts of interest and providing related contact information on the institution’s website	Developing research integrity courses in the university curriculum	Publishing the contact details and affiliation of their editor-in-chief, editorial boards and journal	Informing institution after suspecting a misconduct case with providing enough evidence and properly answering their questions
Establishing polices about spotting scientific misconduct and further punishments	Properly answering journal questions or requirements in the case of spotting misconduct	Establishing policies on investigation and further actions about misconduct cases and closely inspecting details of all co-authors	Publishing Expressions of Concern in some cases to inform reader of ongoing investigation that may affect the validity and reliability of the study
Refusing to qualify students/masters based on metrics e.g. number of publications	Announcing all the affected journals which published related articles based on the retracted/corrected paper	Following the COPE flowcharts and guidelines	Providing the full information of retracted papers
Rechecking previous studies of a researcher who was detected to employ misconduct	Holding language and illustration skills courses	In the case of plagiarism and redundant publication, several journals should collaborate and share the related information	Stopping IF manipulation and producing journals under deceptive titles
Making checklists for authors about different kind of misconduct to be sure that none of them is employed.		Turning of the automated system in which authors can provide the contact information of potential reviewers.

In line with external factors, scholars and researchers themselves should be able to step up their language (esp. English) or illustration skills and attend advanced courses, hence overcome the tendency of duplication and plagiarism. Also to avoid losing their authorship right and developing issues like ghost or guest authorship, scholars are better to reach an agreement with other authors at the start of the work and quickly report dereliction to the relevant institution or journal, if there is any.

More considerable, authors should spot predatory journals via thoroughly checking journal’s contact information, articles issues, and membership in prestigious indexing databases such as Web of Science and scientific committees, editorial board, and peer-review process. Albeit, relying on just these items are insufficient since predatory journals may find a way to be listed in the COPE or similar agencies to appear valid. Therefore, in this case, more than the author’s role, in-charge agencies of publication ethics should invite all people to fight against predatory journals, either in the form of creating more forums, meetings and educational campaigns or by providing a consensual definition of predatory and its destructive effects which is absolutely essential. Providing black list journals is not recommended while a white list of journals could better help scholars of each universities. In view of top officials, legal retributions ranging from cutting grants to limiting academic and carrier promotion should be brought on any minor misconduct. Government should also set sufficient research budget, provide laboratory equipment and confine university admissions.

Conclusion

To sum up, there is an ever increasing incidence of scientific misconduct all around the world with plagiarism, authorship issues and peer review manipulation at the front mainly due to the excess pressure on academic environment and paying much attention to metrics that leaves a gap in knowledge. The importance of predatory journals and political issues i.e. severe sanctions, especially in the current era of publication are also among other critical factors that should not be missed. But what is really perturbing is that misconduct regardless what the type or reason is, could significantly impact on community and preparatory by the means of imposing major financial or jail punishments, violating preparatory/journal credit within paper retraction, getting suspension from education/work and more noticeably causing many deaths. Thus, it is of high priority for both infrastructures and researchers to seek for a fundamental solution to eradicate this phenomenon before impairing society anymore.

Authors’ contribution

MA conceived and supervised whole study from idea to writing. TM contributed in the search, drafting the article, and designing the figures.

Funding

This article is the outcome of an in-house financially non-supported study.

Compliance with ethical standards

Conflict of interest

Authors declare no conflict interest. The corresponding author of this article with regards to his position as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, has been fully blind to all handling and review processes.