Scientific and academic publications report the progress of new research in science. Scholars inform about their new contributions in science by the means of academic literature. Scientific publications have a rapid global growth, however, there are worldwide concerns about various types of unethical scholarly practice or research misconduct all over the scientific community (e.g., Hvistendahl 2013; Ataie-Ashtiani 2016; Stone 2016).

The world map of scientific plagiarism based on the technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv between 1991 and 2012 was prepared by accounting the number of authors who have copied significant chunks of the previously published works in their papers (Bohannon 2014). 57 nations with the minimum number of 100 submitted papers were considered in Bohannon’s study. Ataie-Ashtiani (2017) provided a country ranking of the publication misconduct based on the number of retracted articles of the top 25 countries, in the number of publications, for the period of 1996–2014 using the Scopus database. Both of these studies showed that China is far ahead of the other countries in academic publication misconduct, followed by other nations such as Iran and India.

Here, a comprehensive scientific misconduct ranking of 180 countries and a three-dimensional world map of scientific misconduct is presented following the method of Ataie-Ashtiani (2017). The retracted scientific publications are closely associated to academic misconduct (Fang et al. 2012). The present date including the total number of documents and the number of retracted articles for the period from 2011 to now (15 March 2017) are compiled to provide an update status of the geography of academic misconduct. The total number of 19,967,965 documents and 4960 retracted articles were considered. The ratio of academic misconduct as the number of retracted documents to the total number of documents is calculated for each country and results are shown in the three-dimensional map in video S1 [Misconduct_WorldMap.mp4].

The data has also been provided in Table 1 only for the 46 nations with more than 50,000 documents in the database to avoid distortion (e.g., In Myanmar, there are only 1090 documents and the retracted articles are 2, therefore the ratio of misconduct is the highest for this country among the 180 nations). China, Malaysia, Mexico, Taiwan, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Egypt are the leading countries in the publication misconduct ladder among these 46. Almost all of them are among developing countries, emphasising higher education and academic research, for the sake of scientific development advancement.

Table 1 Nations with more than 50,000 documents from 2011 to 15 March 2017
Full size table

China with 4353 retracted articles out of 2,741,274 documents is the leading nation in breaching scientific integrity. If the ratio of misconduct for each country is normalized to that for Brazil, for the top 10 countries the ratios are 209, 42, 34, 24, 18, 18, 11, 11, 9, and 9 times higher than that for Brazil, which shows that China’s scientific misconduct is an order of magnitude higher than those nations who follow it in this regard. This geographical scrutiny of publication misconduct confirms Ataie-Ashtiani (2017) that the nations with the highest growth rate of scientific publications are also leading nations in publications misconduct. As a common index of scientific development, publications are exceedingly expected in these countries and researchers are under pressure of “publish or perish” (Qiu 2010), therefore, these countries need to profoundly promote research integrity among academic communities and to shift the stress from quantity to quality of publications.