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Nations expanding their research programmes impose sweeping penalties for malpractice
Benjamin Plackett is a freelance science journalist in Portsmouth, UK.
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In response to high retraction rates, India, Peru and Vietnam have introduced guidelines and disciplinary measures against research misconduct.Credit: designer491/iStock via Getty
In a bid to tighten research standards, governments and funders in countries with emerging research systems are increasingly rolling out disciplinary measures for researchers who do the wrong thing. The policies include docking bonuses, restricting access to grants and lowering the rankings of institutions linked to misconduct.
The reforms come as instances of research misconduct are on the rise worldwide. In May, for example, an audit1 of biomedical papers found that the rate of fabricated citations was 12 times greater in 2025 than in 2023. And later that month, an analysis2 of 33,000 cancer studies linked roughly 12% of them to suspected paper-mill activity.
The responsibility for cleaning up research malpractice has, for a long time, been a bottom-up affair: journal editors withdraw papers; universities investigate their staff members; and independent sleuths and organizations, such as Retraction Watch, expose what they can. Sometimes researchers will come forwards and correct the record themselves once they realize that they’ve made an error.
Retractions caused by honest mistakes are extremely stressful, say researchers
But there is a growing movement, particularly in countries with emerging research communities, to take a top-down approach. Funders and governments in some nations are increasingly restricting grants and opportunities for scientists who have been accused of research-integrity malpractice. These changes seek to cover a wide range of integrity issues, from plagiarism and falsified data to image manipulation and peer-review fraud.
Elisabeth Bik, an independent research-integrity consultant based in the the San Francisco Bay area, California, welcomes the roll-out of schemes that penalize malpractice in this way. “In order to tackle misconduct, there needs to be some type of sanction,” she says. “If there wasn’t the chance of getting a ticket, we’d all be speeding. There is fierce competition in science, and if people who cheat get better papers, then why not cheat yourself? We need to see that car being pulled over to warn other people.”
The top-down approach is needed, she says, because universities can be reluctant to sanction their own researchers, fearing that it will negatively affect their reputation. “Universities don’t do a great job in holding people accountable,” explains Bik. “It needs to be done by institutions with teeth.”