2023 — The Year Research Realized it’s in a Crisis
A year-end report of the state of research in the World and India
-India Research Watchdog
All recent indicators and statistics point to a deep crisis in research worldwide. The conditions are especially dire in places like India. In this year round-up we talk about the big stories in research, along with our original analyses.
This article is divided mainly in two parts. The Global view, and the more detailed look at research misconduct in India.
Global Research Crisis
An article in Nature showed that in 2023, the world collectively broke the barrier of 10,000 retractions. A retraction is when an article is recalled because of problems associated with it. It can happen due to multiple reasons, but is generally viewed negatively. Enough talk, here are the numbers (Fig 1) :
This should be enough to set the global alarm bells ringing. Instead it is the publishers’ cash registers that are ringing. Another study found that over a billion dollars (that's right Billion with a B) were paid as Article Processing Charges (APC) in last 4 years to various publishers.
Academia which is perennially underfunded can ill afford spending such huge amount of money for publishing, which can essentially be done for free, like the report you are currently reading.
Let’s not digress though. Where are those retractions coming from? We analyzed retractions for the past 15 years and found that the biggest contributors to the increasing retractions are (don’t hold your breath) China and India. In fact in this detailed analysis, we can also see that the quality of publications in China and India is low and decreasing. See the following infographic :
Our work was published by The Hindu. We hope that it has sent a wake up call to the authorities and 2024 will see some measures being taken to get out of this crisis.
We also studied which countries have the maximum increase of retractions in the last three years. The results were (not) surprising.
This year also saw some really famous people being caught for scientific misconduct.
Stanford president resigned over allegations of scientific misconduct. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/us/stanford-president-resigns-tessier-lavigne.html .
Another Harvard professor, Francesca Gino, was caught falsifying data. Ironically, she did research on honesty. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/25/harvard-professor-data-fraud.
The rot has reached the very top. Fellow World Academics, time to get our shit together before people stop trusting us completely!
India Research Crisis
As we established in the previous section, India has seen a huge rise in retractions and scientific misconduct. We tried to find out which Indian institutes and Universities were the source of those retractions. What we found were really troubling as the toppers of this dubious list were some of the top ranked universities.
The Hall of Shame shows the universities in India with highest retractions. Be careful with your jaw, because its going to drop seeing the next image.
This shows the state of rot in India. It has not just reached, but infested the very top. It calls for urgent action. This is affecting not just Indian Research but Education as well as professors cut corners in teaching to concentrate more on increasing publication count.
When surveyed, majority of the India Research Watchdog Community thought that flawed University Ranking Parameters are responsible for the added pressure to publish.
Clearly something is wrong with the parameters which is pushing Universities and professors to publish dubious research papers. We investigated NIRF rankings and found that there are fundamental flaws in its methodology, which is being gamed by universities.
The main issue is the over-reliance of the rankings on two parameters, Size and Number of Publications. Here’s data :
Additionally, there is a strange paradox when we look closely at the data. Research Quantity and Research Quality are closely correlated. Infact they are almost the same. This means that Number of publications become doubly important! We suspect the reason for this can be simply self-citations.
We hope NIRF is looked at closely and critically, and redesigned to address these flaws. It has a massive effect on students’ and professors’ choice of universities. The massive reliance on Research Quantity is definitely a big reason for the increase in research misconduct in India.
We hope to continue our analyses in 2024 and shed light on the problems in Indian Research and Higher Education. If you have read till here, we hope you will continue to support us in whatever way you can in 2024.
Together, we can hopefully save Indian Science and Education from the crisis that we are witnessing.
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