Two Decades of Scientific Misconduct in India: Retraction Reasons and Journal Quality among Inter-country and Intra-country Institutional Collaboration

TL;DR

This study analyzes $3244$ Indian-affiliated retractions from the Retraction Watch database to characterize trends, journal quality patterns, institutional roles, and collaboration structures over two decades. It finds an overall rise in retractions with a peak around $2022$, a shortening of time-to-retraction, and a dominant role for fake peer review—especially in private institutions—alongside data integrity and plagiarism signals in other contexts. The analysis contrasts intra-country and inter-country collaborations, revealing different distributions across journal quartiles, retraction reasons, and document types, and highlights publishers (notably Springer, IOP, and Elsevier) as major actors. The results underscore the influence of institutional incentives on research integrity and advocate for targeted ethics training, robust misconduct reporting, and policy reforms to curb “publish or perish” pressures and improve quality in Indian research ecosystems.

Abstract

Research stands as a pivotal factor in propelling the progress of any nation forward. However, if tainted by misconduct, it poses a significant threat to the nation's development. This study aims to scrutinize various cases of deliberate scientific misconduct by Indian researchers. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on 3,244 retracted publications sourced from the Retraction Watch database. The upward trend in retractions is alarming, although the decreasing duration of retractions indicates proactive measures by journals against misconduct. Approximately 60% of retractions stem from private institutions, with fake peer reviews identified as the primary cause of misconduct. This trend could be attributed to incentivizing publication quantity over quality in private institutions, potentially fostering unfair publishing practices. Retractions due to data integrity issues are predominantly observed in public and medical institutions, while retractions due to plagiarism occur in conference proceedings and non-Scopus-indexed journals. Examining retractions resulting from institutional collaborations reveals that 80% originate from within the country, with the remaining 20% being international collaborations. Among inter-country collaborations, one-third of retractions come from the top two journal quartiles, whereas, in intra-country collaborations, half of the retractions stem from Q1 and Q2 journals. Clinical studies retracted from intra-country collaborations are mostly from Q3 and Q4 journals, whereas in inter-country collaborations, they primarily come from Q1 journals. Regarding top journals by the number of retractions in intra-country collaborations, they belong to the Q2 and Q4 categories, whereas in inter-country collaborations, they are in Q1.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Data collection and filtration process of India affiliated retracted publications.
• Figure 2: (a) Publication timeline of retracted papers (solid black) and retraction timeline of published papers (dotted red). (b) Retraction time in months.
• Figure 3: Number of retractions as per journal quartile.
• Figure 4: Number of retractions as per institute category.
• Figure 5: (a) Author's collaboration count. (b) Institute collaboration count.