Page 12 - Academic and Research Book_WEB

CHAPTER 1

Academic Integrity and Research Quality

Bhushan Patwardhan and Archana Thakur

Very rigorous, scientific, and responsible efforts through research and innovation are needed
in the quest for truth, and for creating or presenting new and authentic scientific information,
to contribute to socio-economic benefits for the global community. It is important to ethically
improve quality and simultaneously prevent any academic misconduct, including plagiarism.
Serious concerns have been raised over many years now, especially with the increasing trend for
publishing research papers in international journals, regarding fake information following the
debacle of the “Fabrication, Falsification and Plagiarism” crisis. Faculty members, scientists, and
other stakeholders need to take a firm stand against any such trends. It has also been stressed
that they must contradict those who promote it (Hopf, et al., 2019). The increasing occurrence of
compromised publication ethics and deteriorating academic integrity is a global problem and it is a
blot on all areas of research.

India is no exception and to get to the root of the matter, we must appreciate the complex and
diverse higher education system in India. The University Grants Commission (UGC) is a statutory
organization established by the Government of India (GoI) for the coordination, determination,
and maintenance of standards of teaching, examination, and research in university education. India
has over 40,000 colleges providing undergraduate courses and over 900 universities focused on
postgraduate education and research.

According to the data of 2019-2020 of an All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), about 1.503
million teachers were present in the system at that time to train 38.56 million students, of which 4.312
million were in the Master’s programmes and 202,550 in doctoral programmes. During 2019, about
38,986 students were awarded Ph.D. degrees. The GoI awards nearly 10,000 research fellowships every
year. According to Scopus data, about 147,537 articles were published from India. Majority of the
research articles published are contributed from over 100 institutes of national importance and from
a large number of national laboratories managed through different research councils. Historically,
a typical Indian affiliating university caters to degree education, whereas the national institutes and
laboratories are focused on research. Except in a few cases, this bifurcation seems to be a major reason
for the poor research culture in most Indian universities.

New Parameters

With the inevitable push towards better assessment of academics, new quantitative parameters
emerged such as the h-index, which is a measure of how many times an academic, typically a scientist,
is cited by others in the field, and the Impact Factor (IF) of a journal, which is roughly an equivalent
measure for the publishing medium itself. The CiteScore is a new metrics from Elsevier that provides
comprehensive, transparent, and current insights into journal impact.

The quantification of research output through bibliometrics has also become almost inflexible or confining
worldwide, often even substituting for qualitative assessments that can supposedly become subjective and
therefore whimsical. However, h-indices, CiteScore and IFs, while they may be precise in one way, need not
always be accurate with respect to judging the quality and importance of a researcher’s work.

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