Academic integrity and fraud in higher education: Thematic networks and disciplinary clusters in global research

Abstract

Objective. We analyzed the thematic structure and intellectual foundations of academic fraud and other forms of corruption in higher education.

Design/Methodology/Approach. We employed bibliometric techniques such as term co-occurrence and journal co-citation analysis to identify, first, the main thematic research clusters and, second, the most influential journals within each identified theme. Data was collected from the Scopus database for the period 1896 to 2024. The final corpus consisted of 5,374 documents.

Results/Discussion. We identified three thematic clusters: (1) “institutional and systemic academic fraud,” (2) “Academic integrity, ethics, and educational policies,” and (3) “Higher education, regulation, and international context”. The most co-cited journal was Academic Medicine, followed by Plos One, Higher Education, Science and Engineering Ethics, and Journal of Academic Ethics. One of the most notable aspects is that the co-citation map for cluster 1, which focused on academic fraud as an institutional and systemic practice, has an internal structure surprisingly similar to the overall co-citation map created from all the documents in the corpus. In contrast, the maps derived from clusters 2 and 3, related to institutional ethics, integrity, and higher education policies, did not display internal segmentation into multiple clusters but instead formed more homogeneous networks. Academic Medicine resulted in being one of the most co-cited publications in all three clusters and held central positions in terms of both frequency and link strength.

Conclusions. The results indicate that the study of academic fraud is a diverse yet interconnected field that draws on knowledge from education, ethics, institutional management, psychology, and social sciences. This diversity is both a strength and a challenge, as it risks fragmenting the field if a more systematic dialogue between approaches is not encouraged.