Over two decades of scientific misconduct in India: Retraction reasons and journal quality among inter-country and intra-country institutional collaboration

Research is a pivotal factor in propelling the progress of any nation forward. However, if it is contaminated by misconduct, it poses a significant threat to the development of the country. Recognizing the importance of genuine research and understanding the ramifications of scientific malpractice is essential for grasping a nation’s trajectory of growth. This study aims to examine various cases of scientific misconduct by Indian researchers. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on 3244 retracted publications sourced from the Retraction Watch database. The upward trend in retractions is alarming, although the decreasing duration of retractions indicates proactive measures by journals against misconduct. More than half of the retractions come from private institutions, with fake peer reviews identified as the primary reason for misconduct. This trend could be attributed to the incentivization of quantity over quality in private institutions, which could foster unfair publishing practices. Retractions due to data integrity issues are predominantly observed in public and medical institutions, while retractions due to plagiarism occur in conference proceedings and non-Scopus-indexed journals. Examining retractions resulting from institutional collaborations reveals that 80% originates within the country, while the remaining 20% are international collaborations. In the realm of international collaborations, one third of retractions originate from high-ranking journals, while within domestic collaborations, half of retractions arise from similarly-esteemed publications. In contrast, a significant portion 86% of retractions stem from articles and conference proceedings within domestic collaborations, compared to 87% originating solely from articles in international collaborations. Furthermore, when examining the top journals in terms of retraction frequency within domestic collaborations, they are typically distributed among all categories, with a major proportion in Q1, whereas in international collaborations, they are predominantly found in the Q1 and Q2 categories. This highlights the tendency for retractions associated with international partnerships to occur in prestigious journals, while those linked with domestic collaborations often involve publications of higher to lower quality. The other highlight is that the highest number of retractions occurs when the authors are from the same institutions.