Some 869 Russian scientific articles have been retracted and more may be coming, the Washington Post reports.
It adds that in 2012, President Vladimir Putin called on Russia to redouble its scientific power and boost the number of Russian universities in the top 100. This, the Post says, led to not only more funding, but also more pressure on scientists to get papers out, no matter their quality.
A commission put together by the Russian Academy of Sciences, though, has found numerous cases of plagiarism, paper duplications, and unclear authorship and called for 2,528 research articles to be retracted, the Post reports. It adds that as of earlier this month, 869 papers have been removed from 263 journals.
"This is the largest retraction in Russian scientific history. Never before have hundreds of papers been retracted," Andrei Zayakin, the scientific secretary of the RAS Commission for Countering the Falsification of Scientific Research, tells the Post. "Before two years ago, there might have been single cases, but not even dozens."