From plagiarism to predatory publishing: Organizational factors in explaining academic misconduct

Our study contributes to the literature pertaining to plagiarism that focuses on the systemic factors underlying academic misconduct. While most such research has been conducted in Western countries, such as the US, UK, Australia, and Canada, we collected data from the academic periphery. On the country level, the incidence of plagiarism is higher in the academic periphery . However, these country level differences can conceal the variance within national academic communities; consequently, we focus on organizational characteristics as a potential source of influence in this context. We find that organizational factors allow us to predict reported academic misconduct better in the context of predatory publishing, while such factors are less relevant for predicting the incidence of academic plagiarism. An exception to this general rule is the possibility of sanctions that an organization would implement in the case of misconduct. A lack of organizational sanctions is positively associated with reported questionable research practices, with respect to both publishing in predatory journals and academic plagiarism.