The ministry of Higher education and research entrusted to the national Centre of scientific research (CNRS) a mission on scientific integrity. Scientific fraud is varied: biased manufacturing or forgery of results, biased interpretation or selection of data, alteration of curves or images, plagiarism, theft of ideas, financial profit-sharing's ... The increasing pressure which practices on the researchers (among which the career and the credits depend strictly on the quantity of articles and on produced results) tend to multiply the fraudulent practices.

An investigation published by Nature, reveals that a scientific plagiarism has course among researchers too. Two researchers from South-western Medical Centre of the University of Texas, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, auscultated an American medical documentation base, Medline, where summaries of 17 million articles published in more than 5,000 reviews from some 80 countries are indexed. They screened it through an engine search, eTBLAST, which is able to locate the "similarities". While focusing on the most quoted 7 million articles, they located a little more than 70,000 cases of "high resemblance". That which, taking into account the limits of the software, makes them estimate the number of plagiarisms at more than 200,000, out of the 17 million referred articles.

Popular web-based auction sites such as eBay could be contributing to the spiralling number of plagiarism cases occurring at British universities. Increasing numbers of students are turning to commercial sales sites to both buy and sell dissertations and essays on the web. Powerpoint presentations and slides have emerged as the newest form of work to attract buyers on the internet.

A well-known obesity researcher will plead guilty to making material false statements in a 1999 grant application worth $542,000 from the US National Institutes of Health. The researcher, who held various research positions at the University of Vermont (UVM) College of Medicine in Burlington could go to jail for up to 5 years.

The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Universities Australia have launched a revision version of a Code for Responsible Research. The purpose of the Code is to guide institutions and researchers in responsible research practices. It embraces topics such as managing data and materials; publication and dissemination of findings; attribution; peer review processes and conflict of interest.

Since the 1990s, corruption has seriously threatened mainland China's universities in their teaching, research, service to society, and international links and exchanges. Yet, discussions of corruption have been largely confined to exchanges on the Internet. The Chinese masses know little of these discussions. The government has just begun to address this issue by instituting countermeasures.