Universities may attract penalty, including a freeze of grants, if its teachers are found to be guiding more than eight PhD students at any given point in time as part of a drive to plug lacunae in research. The University Grants Commission will ask all universities to have anti-plagiarism software to ensure that the thesis papers reflect genuine research. The step assumes significance against the backdrop of some agencies offering their services to research scholars to draft theses for them for a fee.

A former Iowa State University researcher who fabricated the results of an experimental HIV vaccine was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison recently. He was also ordered to pay US$7.2 million to the US National Institutes of Health that funded the research.

Research and technology and higher education minister said that he would soon publish the names of universities that were alleged to have issued fake diplomas. He said that he had set up a special team to investigate the case and would carry out impromptu visits to the suspected universities in the near future.

A government-commissioned study of the placement of Norwegian universities in global rankings – in particular compared to other Nordic institutions – has concluded that even the top rankings are so based on subjective weightings of factors and on dubious data that they are useless as a basis for information if the goal is to improve higher education.

Taiwan's Education Minister resigned on Monday 14 July over his links to a researcher whose papers were retracted from an international scientific journal because of alleged fraud.

Around two-thirds of China's top research universities still have policies that can be used to limit the proportion of women students, despite tighter government regulations issued this year against gender discrimination in universities and the workplace.

A new Ministry of Education regulation to punish academic fraud has come into effect to clamp down on plagiarism and fabricating research data, as well as buying, selling or organizing trade in academic degree theses, including all forms of "ghostwriting" or buying of materials produced by essay mills.

Controversy over plagiarism in the PhD thesis of the director of Thailand's National Innovation Agency, or NIA, has highlighted concerns over academic integrity and a widespread culture of plagiarism. Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University revoked the PhD – for the first time in the institution's history.

Students and professors at South Korea's Kookmin University, the center of a plagiarism scandal involving two recently elected legislators, have joined opposition politicians in demanding that the lawmakers give up their seats after being found to have copied material for their doctoral dissertations.

In an effort to control increasing cases of plagiarism and low quality research, the All India Council for Technical Education, AICTE, is to launch Project Factory – an online repository aimed at capturing abstracts of all postgraduate projects.