Mass-produced PhDs lie at heart of Russia’s ‘plague’ of doctoral fraud

Academic ‘scallywags’ are gaining doctorates thanks to the circulation of dodgy theses within some universities, says the founder of plagiarism pressure group. The extraordinary scale of PhD fraud in Russia can be attributed to the reproduction of near-identical doctoral dissertations within universities, with more than 3,500 falsified theses identified by the anti-plagiarism group Dissernet in the past two years.