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Some 82 cases of professors listing their secondary school offspring as co-authors in academic papers have been unearthed by an investigation by South Korea’s ministry of education. According to a Korea Herald Editorial, “It is obvious why the professors included the names of their children in the papers. The merit of being co-authors of research papers gives them a good advantage in seeking to enter universities through special admissions programmes”. The discovery could lead to disciplinary action in some cases, under Korea’s strict research misconduct laws which cover author attribution of research papers.

The Higher Education Commission (HEC) will meet next week to decide the fate of its second most important officer whose research paper was found to be 88 percent plagiarized. The Chairman had set up a committee to probe the allegations of plagiarism against the commission’s Executive Director (ED). Sources said after the issue came to the light through a news story published in this paper, the committee formed by the HEC Chairman held a meeting this week to review the Executive Director’s research paper which was found plagiarized.

The Swedish organization in charge of reviewing research has judged that scandal-hit surgeon was guilty of scientific misconduct for misleadingly describing synthetic trachea operations as successful in a series of research articles. In 2014, four doctors at Stockholm's Karolinska University Hospital reported him to the then president of the Karolinska Institute (KI) for allegedly distorting the facts about his operations with artificial tracheas when presenting them in scientific journals. The articles were subsequently reviewed in 2015 by Uppsala University surgical sciences professor, who concluded that Macchiarini was guilty of research misconduct, but KI's overall assessment was to clear him and the co-authors.

Plagiarism at the higher education level has been an open secret, with many suspected plagiarists holding senior faculty positions in different universities across the country. But in a comical turn, the Higher Education Commission recently gave its best research paper award to a scholar who had been blacklisted by the regulatory body in 2008 for publishing a plagiarized paper.