In recent years, Serbia has appeared more and more often in news stories about violations of research ethics: plagiarism in the dissertations of high-ranking officials, purchased authorship, mass retractions of publications, dubious international collaborations, and studies verging on scientific curiosities. And also — mass political persecution of scholars and university teachers. Are these episodes accidental, or are they manifestations of one and the same problem? Plagiat-Navigator tried to make sense of the situation.

A questionable publication in Nature, several fake images, a professor with a dozen suspicious papers, a phantom author with an h-index who turns out to be a Zenit football fan from a fan website — this is not an isolated oddity, but part of a system, a cross-section of today’s Belgian academic environment. More in the latest installment of Plagiarism Navigator.

In Georgia’s academic world, an entire industry of research fraud hides behind the mask of high citation indices, prestigious journals, and academy memberships. Professors with international reputations use crude distortions, AI-generated images of geese instead of scientific graphs, and blatant plagiarism to churn out publications and secure grants. Plagiat-Navigator tried to make sense of the situation that has developed in Georgia.

In a previous Plagiarism Navigator investigation, we exposed Iranian scholars who defended stolen Russian dissertations—translated into Tajik—at Tajik universities. They exploited a loophole known as “dissertation tourism,” which offers a backdoor into the global academic community: via Tajikistan and Russia’s Higher Attestation Commission (VAK). Unsurprisingly, Tajik scholars themselves have embraced this backdoor enthusiastically. With the highest number of plagiarized dissertations per capita, Tajikistan tops Dissernet’s global rankings by a wide margin. Today, we examine the career of Kobiljon Khushvakhtzoda—a former provincial accountant who climbed the ranks to become Chairman of Tajikistan’s Academy of Sciences.

T-invariant, co-founder of Dissernet Andrey Rostovtsev and community project coordinator Larisa Melikhova continue their “Plagiarism Navigator”. Through individual cases of international academic plagiarism, we examine the global-scale imitation of scholarly activity. The sixth installment examines how translated academic fraud became a commercialized scheme for Russian and Ukrainian scholars.

T-invariant, co-founder of Dissernet Andrey Rostovtsev and community project coordinator Larisa Melikhova continue their “Plagiarism Navigator”. Through individual cases of international academic plagiarism, we examine the global-scale imitation of scholarly activity. In the fifth installment, we examine the case of Andriy Vitrenko, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Education and Science, whose dissertation and academic papers have been flagged for plagiarism.

T-invariant, co-founder of Dissernet Andrei Rostovtsev, and community project coordinator Larisa Melikhova are launching “Plagiarism Navigator”. Through select cases of international academic plagiarism, the project reveals how imitation of scholarly activity operates on a planetary scale. The first installment tells the story of a Chinese scholar who defended a dissertation in Kharkiv—a work essentially composed of Ukrainian translations of two Russian-language theses. 

T-invariant has repeatedly described how the Ministry of Education and Science and the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences are destroying the Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IPPI RAS). The demonstrative cancellation of the contract with the head of the institute, Andrei Sobolevsky, ignoring the opinion of scientists, led to a conflict between the scientific staff and the new directorate, the departure of a number of employees to MIPT, and the appointment of Dmitry Repin, a scientist with a dubious reputation, as deputy director. The Academic Council of IPPI has recently been headed by Dissertnet members.

The redistribution of the market for the publication and distribution of academic scientific journals has led not only to serious delays in the publication of scientists’ works, but also to Russia’s self-isolation in the global market of scientific periodicals. By the beginning of December 2024, almost 75% of Russian academic scientific journals have not gone to press on time. This is the price of striving to publish scientific journals with a “Russian identity” and without foreign influence. T-invariant tells us what has already happened to Russian scientific periodicals and what else may happen to them.

Recently, American scientist Sam Payne received a review of his own article published three years earlier, but now its authors were five employees of Sechenov University. So the world scientific community learnt about the Russian company “International Publisher”, which is engaged in the production of fake scientific articles and places them for money in major foreign journals. More details – in the material T-invariant.

In early September, it became known that Dmitry Repin, who previously held the position of Advisor to the Rector of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, was appointed Acting Deputy Director of IPPI RAS. The appointment took place against the background of the ongoing public conflict between the scientific staff of the institute and the recently appointed acting director of IPPI Maxim Fedorov. T-invariant tells what is known about the new administrator of the institute.