E-Paper
Strengthening the three pillars of scientific research integrity: Policy, education, and collaboration
This article is authored by Laura Hassink, managing director, Journals, Elsevier.
In the last decade, India’s research production has doubled. In 2024, India climbed to third rank in research output, behind only China and the US. While building up research capabilities is a vital step forward for the nation, an equal emphasis must be placed on research integrity to ensure that the volume of research does not come at the expense of quality and credibility. According to the 2025 Research Integrity Risk Index (RI2), India topped the global list of high-risk academic institutions with dubious research quality. Plagiarism, data manipulation, and paper mills are leading contributing factors, undermining India’s research credibility at the international level.
This year, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) adopted practical steps to strengthen research integrity across institutions. It announced penalties for retracted papers, evaluated over the last three-year period. With negative scoring for poor research practices, this move is expected to incentivise institutions to tighten quality control and improve best practices. This is an important step towards building a culture of research integrity and credibility, which will be necessary for India to compete with innovation giants like the US and China. Sustainably improving scientific research credibility across the nation requires coordinated efforts in policy, education, and collaboration, aligning with global standards and creating accountability across levels.
Policy intent to ensure research integrity is very much present. Bodies like the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) have established ethical guidelines. However, the gap between policy and on-the-ground implementation remains wide. While many institutions offer research integrity training, it is not always mandatory. Policy efforts can address these gaps by setting up mandatory institutional committees for research ethics: functional cells to train researchers in best practices and to handle allegations fairly and efficiently.
Addressing plagiarism and dubious research practices at an institutional level through stricter quality checks will help reduce the number of retractions, which are always post-facto. Building a culture of research integrity requires preventative measures as much as curative ones. Adopting specialised platforms and technology can help institutions monitor the health of their research output, identify unusual patterns that might indicate integrity risks, and benchmark their practices against global standards, thereby providing the data-driven evidence needed to inform and enforce effective internal policies.
Integrity breaches do not always stem from malice, but also from a lack of knowledge. The pressure to "publish or perish," high emphasis placed on research output for career progression, combined with insufficient training in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR), creates the conditions for poor quality research to proliferate. Practices of integrity must be taught as well as embedded in systems.
The solution lies in making research ethics a non-negotiable core of academic training. Mandatory, credit-bearing modules on RCR should be required for every postgraduate student in the country. Equally important is training for supervisors and faculty, empowering them to mentor on integrity with the same rigour they apply to scientific techniques.
The life of a research paper does not end at publication. In today’s interconnected world, science is a continuous, collaborative process of validation and correction. The scientific community itself is now taking a more active role in this quality control, such as the post-publication peer review online toolkit created by the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG). This empowers researchers to systematically scrutinise published work, a vital function for correcting the scientific record.
India must proactively embrace this collaborative ethos. We should encourage our researchers to engage in post-publication discussions on professional networks and view this not as criticism, but as an essential part of the scientific discourse. Fostering more national and international partnerships also builds in natural checks and balances, strengthening the validity of findings.
Publishers play a critical role in facilitating this ecosystem. They serve as social networks where researchers can discover, discuss, and collaborate. Furthermore, a commitment from publishers to clearly link retracted articles to their notices of retraction ensures the scholarly record remains accurate and trustworthy for all.
These three pillars are not standalone ways to strengthen India’s research integrity, but are an interconnected approach to ensuring lasting behaviour change and measurably raising the standard of excellence in research. It is only when India proves its research credibility along with its prowess that it will achieve its aim of becoming a global innovation hub.
This article is authored by Laura Hassink, managing director, Journals, Elsevier.
