A world-renowned expert on the reduction of risks involved in heart surgery has been dismissed from Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, after violation of academic integrity. In one study it was found that he used patient data without permission, used fictitious data, and that two reports were submitted to conferences which included knowingly unreliable data.

The study "Plagiarism and the Web" analyzed more than 33.5 million papers submitted to the Turnitin service from June 2010 to June 2011. In those papers, iParadigms' researchers found 128 million "content matches" from a wide variety of Web sources.

A member of the European Parliament has bowed to pressure from Germany's major higher education and research organisations and stepped down from her new post in the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, following plagiarism accusations.

There have been calls for Welsh universities to be more consistent in dealing with students who plagiarise. New figures show between 2008 and 2011, 927 students from six Welsh universities copied work.

iParadigms, creators of Turnitin and the leader in originality checking and plagiarism prevention, today announced the results of a new plagiarism study which shows that social and user-generated web sites are the most popular resources for student copying, followed by academic and homework-related sites

Weeks after Germany's defense minister was forced to resign in a plagiarism scandal, three German universities say they are investigating similar complaints about the academic work of three figures from the country's political sphere.

Denmark has been rocked by a science fraud case involving a high-profile professor of medicine specialising in brain research. The case has also embroiled the rector of Copenhagen University, the previous minister of science and a number of co-authors, and has undermined the public view of science.

The Italian cabinet has ordered the roll-out of a national accreditation scheme for academics to stamp out nepotism. Under the new scheme, commissions of five senior academics appointed in each university will accredit applicants for associate or full professorships on the basis of the quality and quantity of their academic output.