<p>Studies about the causes of research misconduct focus on a limited range, and negative emotions are an omitted but critical area. By utilizing theories from sociology and criminology of emotions, the current study adopts an emotional aspect to analyze researchers’ academic integrity issues in Chinese universities. Particularly, it examines how working stress, caused by the aggressive implementation of national policies for chasing more influential academic publications in top domestic and international journals, influences faculty members’ emotional feelings, arguing that due to worries about job security and a lack of means to release negative emotions, some scholars may choose to engage in misconduct to cope with, seeing it as reasonable and acceptable. The author adopts a qualitative approach (i.e., in-depth interviews and content analysis of official documents) for data collection and analysis. This study contributes to the study of research misconduct because it provides an emotional aspect to analyze the causes of such deviance in academics. It does not aim to defend wrongdoers’ breaching academic integrity; it provides a new angle to analyze the causes of research integrity issues.</p>