Research Misconduct in Developing Countries

Research misconduct is a serious problem that have bad consequences on the research integrity, researchers’ reputation and credibility of the institution. According to the US federal government, research misconduct is “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results…’’. In this paper we use the broad concept of misconduct like major and minor acts or wrongdoings like inappropriate distribution of authorship or not declaring conflict of interest. The author aimed to address the magnitude of the problem in lower and middle-income countries (LMICs) and to highlight the major reasons for it. Research misconduct is a widely distributed problem. The problem in the LMICs is more than developed countries and various reasons were reported. Reasons included individual reasons like language barriers and institutional reasons like lack of policies and guidelines. A more research studies should be conducted to reach a more accurate estimate of the magnitude of the problem.