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major catalyst for the unprecedented rapid technological advances witnessed in recent times, it has
also raised issues of research integrity and ethical conduct because of the global spurt in practices that
are considered to be unethical.

Factors Contributing to Unethical Conduct in Research

Besides the base human follies like greed, egocentrism, the desire to be high up in the social hierarchy,
and so on, a variety of other factors, associated with the prevalent practices in organized research, also
contribute in a big way to the globally increasing incidences of breach of research integrity and ethical
conduct (Sovacool, 2008; Nazemian, et al., 2017; Bellé and Cantarelli, 2017; Edwards and Roy, 2017).
The major causative factors are briefly noted in the following:
Competition: Increasing numbers of researchers and greater societal impact of research outcomes have
escalated the competition for the dissemination of research outputs through publications and other
forms. The competition has become more intense because the research output, typically in the form of
publications and/or patents, has now become the standard measure for inter se comparison between
academic researchers. The increasingly stiff competition places unrealistic demands on “winning the
race”. The race may often not be related to seeking answer to the nature of the scientific question under
pursuit but to personal gains such as appointment for a position, promotion, getting an award or any
other kind of recognition. Such competition for personal ends drives some individuals to find ‘short-
cuts’ and resort to behaviour and acts that are considered unethical. As discussed later, sometimes the
rules and regulations formulated with the objective of maintaining order themselves make the system
highly bureaucratic and stifling. This also can promote misconduct.
A different level of ‘competition’, emanating largely from commercial interests, is seen in the domain
of applied or translational research. Misleading or unsubstantiated claims are made to compete and
garner greater share of the market and thus, “make hay while the sun shines”.

Claiming priority: Since research output is ‘owned’ by researchers/claiming the discovery, and such
ownership is recognized and ‘rewarded’ by society in one form or another, the desire to claim
ownership is natural. With multiple individuals/groups working on similar topics, especially those
that are considered to be ‘hot’ at a given time, competition is bound to be intense, which may prompt
some to find unethical shortcuts to stake the claim ahead of others.

Ranking: The expanded system of ranking of research now covers a wide canvas extending from
individual researchers to journals and institutions at national and international levels. The ranking
is not only associated with ‘prestige’ but also with funding that can be provided for research. With
resources being limited, the race to win a higher ranking is becoming more intense and global,
bringing in its wake a loss of academic and research integrity.

Prestige associated with journal impact factor: During the past three-four decades, the journal
impact factor (JIF) has gained prominence in assessing the quality of research output of individuals
as well as institutions (Bornmann and Marx, 2016; Larivière and Sugimoto, 2016). This has resulted
in a hierarchy of journals so that some journals in each discipline are considered to be better than
others because their arithmetic impact factor value is higher. The undue importance given to
the numerical value of impact factor has generated a race between journals to achieve annually
increasing impact factors. At the same time, researchers are made to aspire to publish their findings
in journals with higher JIF since that is considered to provide a stamp of ‘quality’ and has become
the most important bibliometric indicator of ‘quality’. The high premium, and consequent intense
competition, associated with publication in journals of high impact factors has generated unrealistic,

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