Academic Integrity in Crisis: A Systematic Analysis of Questionable Research Practices

Scientific misconduct has emerged as a growing risk to the academic knowledge base. Questionable research practices such as falsified peer review, predatory conferences, and citation gaming in journal publications have become more prevalent in recent years. As researchers face intense pressure to publish quickly amidst the demand for scholarly findings and literature, the underlying structure of the publishing and research system promotes opportunities for misconduct. The publish-orperish culture creates incentives for scholars, institutions, and journals to engage in questionable behavior, threatening scientific integrity and public welfare. First, this project synthesizes and classifies the scale of scholarly misconduct in academia during the digital age through a comprehensive taxonomy of questionable research practices. Through a literature review and conversations with library science experts, the types of scientific misconduct were classified in a hierarchical taxonomy. This taxonomy was categorized by perpetrator and type of misconduct. The taxonomy and scope were validated through subject matter expert review. An assessment of the scope of each threat was performed using descriptive statistics and time series quantitative data analysis. This analysis was used to identify trends and inform future work.