‘Research’ is no longer merely an academic term. It is as indispensable for climbing the ladder of higher education as it is for demonstrating a student’s analytical ability. Research is not simply data collection; it is the process of illuminating society’s unknown corners and opening new horizons of knowledge. Yet in the age of artificial intelligence, while the research process has grown more accessible, its ethical foundations have grown darker. This dark chapter is familiar to some, and entirely unknown to many others.
‘Publish or perish’ has taken deep root in academic circles across Bangladesh and other developing countries. Riding on this anxiety, a vast network of predatory journals has emerged. An expert at BRAC university noted that a large share of young Bangladeshi researchers have dealt with predatory journals, rarely by accident, mostly under the pressure of ‘publish or perish.’ According to a study, over 79 percent of respondents said the speed of acceptance was their primary motivation for submitting there. Predatory journals exploit exactly that urgency, wearing the appearance of legitimate academic outlets while caring only about fees, not quality. According to UKSG Insights, nearly 60 percent of articles published in predatory journals receive no citations within five years of publication, compared to only 9 percent in Scopus-indexed journals. The research also documents their impact on careers: retractions from such journals are difficult, and authors and their institutions become permanently linked to predatory publishers, damaging future career prospects.
Beyond predatory journals, an even more troubling practice has spread widely both at home and abroad. Pages and groups have emerged on social media platforms selling authorship on research papers in exchange for money. According to Taylor & Francis’s publication ethics policy, this unethical practice takes several forms: ‘gift authorship,’ where a name is added to a paper without any substantive contribution; and ‘authorship for sale,’ where authorship slots are directly bought and sold for cash.
The problem has long since transcended individual greed and become a full industry. According to a study published in ScienceDirect, paper mills are fraudulent organisations that manufacture fake manuscripts and sell authorship slots to academic customers, and thousands of such papers have been successfully published in peer-reviewed journals. Even prominent publishers have not been immune. Outlook India reported that in 2023, a record number of over 10,000 research papers were retracted worldwide.
“Put my name on your paper, and I’ll put yours on mine”; this mutual back-scratching practice is a symptom of a deep disease, and it is now formally documented in peer-reviewed literature. A study examined exactly this phenomenon. Drawing on interviews with 18 university lecturers, the study identifies five distinct patterns of unethical authorship: transactional authorship, promotion-driven padding, hierarchical patronage, reciprocal name-exchange, and unauthorised inclusion. The authors introduce what they call the Authorship Misappropriation Diamond (AMD), a framework that adds ‘normalisation’ to the classic Fraud Diamond model, arguing that when misconduct is repeated often enough, it becomes institutionalised, raising pressure on individuals while eroding their ethical resistance. The same Outlook India report cited a study published in JAMA which found that 19 percent of articles in six prominent medical journals included honorary authors who made no substantive contribution, while 11 percent featured ghost authors whose actual contributions went unacknowledged. Data manipulation and plagiarism are links in the same chain of dishonesty.
What makes this normalisation particularly resistant to correction is the near-total absence of social and institutional accountability. In most cases, academics and researchers entangled in unethical publishing cartels feel no shame, largely because a clear, widely shared understanding of what rigorous research actually demands simply does not exist in our broader milieu. Those who recognise that churning out papers well outside one’s own field of expertise does not constitute meaningful scholarship remain a minority. Far more numerous are those who equate any publication with intellectual achievement and treat prolific output as a mark of distinction. As a result, unethical researchers are rarely marginalised socially; in certain circles, they are actively celebrated. They operate almost entirely beyond legal accountability, and no credible punitive framework exists to deter them. On the rare occasion that an institution does take action, the response is so token and disproportionate that it functions less as a deterrent and more as absolution, punishing the symptom while leaving the system entirely undisturbed.
Bangladesh’s connection to predatory publishing is unfortunately not only as a victim but also as a source. According to research, an organisation operating out of Bangladesh under that name has been internationally identified as a predatory publishing entity. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that authors who wired money to Bangladesh often never saw their papers published, or saw them appear in a poorly edited form. The organisation also lists unwitting academics as editors without their consent. This information is deeply troubling for the international reputation of Bangladesh’s research ecosystem.
I understand the conditions in which researchers in Bangladesh are working. A study published in the Journal of Academic Ethics (Springer) examined perspectives of Bangladeshi university teachers on predatory journals and found that several structural and demographic factors shape their vulnerability. Separately, a research published in Equity in Education & Society (SAGE) found that for many researchers in developing countries, insufficient research funding compels them towards low-cost journals that guarantee faster publication. A study cited in a 2021 article in BMC Medical Ethics observed that academics in developing countries are more likely to publish in predatory journals due to social identity threats, self-doubt about research quality, and above all, the ‘publish or perish’ pressure.
In recent times, many Bangladeshi researchers publishing research papers continuously across various journals, including in fields that lie well outside their own area of expertise, and often alongside co-authors with whom no traceable intellectual connection exists. Perhaps some of them are genuinely multitalented, with deep knowledge beyond their own disciplines. But a question remains.
From passport tourism to various other domains, our international standing is being questioned in ways that compound over time. We must ensure research does not join that list. Conducting research solely to inflate a publication count for foreign scholarships or graduate admissions is a betrayal of the country, and of the ethics of inquiry itself. It not only puts one’s own career at risk. It places the credibility of those who genuinely toil over quality research in jeopardy on the international stage.
New researchers should shift focus from competing over the number of papers to asking what genuinely needs to be understood. One real study that serves the country’s interests is worth far more than ten meaningless papers. Preventing this drift in research requires a collective response from universities, journal authorities, and researchers themselves. If the race for numbers continues to sacrifice quality, it will eventually render Bangladesh’s entire research community untrustworthy in the eyes of the world. The time to act is now.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is a researcher, writer, and environmentalist. E-mail: [email protected]
