Academic Fraud Is a Waste of Taxpayer Dollars

The US government has spent $471 billion supporting academic research over the past decade. A troubling proportion of that work, recent reports suggest, is riddled with errors, plagiarized or fraudulent.

In recent months, some of the nation’s most elite universities and research centers — including Columbia University, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard University and Stanford University — have been ensnared in scandal. And while that’s partly thanks to eager data sleuths armed with detection software, experts say cases of academic misconduct, if anything, are likely underreported. Just a fifth of retractions are due to honest errors.