The topic of ‘research fairness’ is receiving growing attention in Research Integrity (RI) initiatives, with increasing acknowledgement of the relationship between RI and fairness concerns such as diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) and responsible collaborations. However, initiatives usually neglect addressing structural injustices and their relationship to RI. Furthermore, RI standards are mostly set in economically powerful countries, but are applied globally, posing a risk of ethical imperialism and reinforcing existing colonial hierarchies. This study examined whether, and if so how, fairness is understood in RI guidance documents across the world. Three aspects of fairness were analyzed: addressing injustices, attention to colonial hierarchies and DEI. We conducted a scoping review to collect national and international RI guidance documents targeted at researchers. Conducting a search of grey and published literature, we included 66 documents. We used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to assess how fairness is constructed in these documents and to analyze implicit and explicit power dynamics, silences, and assumptions. RI documents originated mostly from European countries, with limited representation from Africa and Latin America. The majority of the included documents referred to fairness only as procedural, covering issues such as fair authorship, peer review, and misconduct investigations. While a large number of guidance documents addressed DEI principles, many employed “diversity” as a superficial concept, while few proposed concrete measures to counter discrimination and systemic inequities. In general, few documents explicitly mentioned issues of injustice, such as knowledge and material extractivism, epistemic injustice, and socioeconomic inequities. Also, few codes explicitly confronted colonial hierarchies, but those that did came from colonized nations. Some documents acknowledged diverse knowledge systems and ethical frameworks. Yet even these often reflected assumptions of colonial hierarchies in their language, for instance portraying Indigenous and marginalized groups as passive agents and receivers of research rather than as active groups capable of conducting research. Overall, most European RI frameworks tended to frame fairness without taking into account structural injustices, colonial hierarchies and DEI systematically, reinforcing watered down, procedural rather than structural visions of fairness. These findings show that fairness is not addressed seriously by most RI initiatives.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly embedded in higher education, shaping how students learn and obtain knowledge. Although AI education is expanding, limited empirical research has examined how undergraduate students exercise ethical judgment about using GenAI in academic situations, particularly in relation to their AI literacy. This study examined undergraduate students’ ethical judgment regarding GenAI use in educational contexts and its relationship to AI literacy and student demographics. A cross-sectional survey was conducted with a convenience sample (n = 531) recruited through two psychology courses at one public Midwestern university. The survey included demographics, six GenAI ethical scenarios, and the Generative AI Literacy Assessment Test (GLAT). Participants generally demonstrated high agreement when classifying the six predesignated scenarios, distinguishing GenAI use that supported learning from use that substituted AI-generated content for original academic work. 57.6
Academic ethics has largely focused on visible forms of misconduct such as plagiarism, fabrication, and professional breaches while paying comparatively less attention to how cognition itself becomes morally evaluated within academic life. This opinion article argues that many academic environments treat stable, autonomous, and continuously available cognition as an implicit marker of credibility, reliability, and professional worth. Under these conditions, cognitive fragility—understood as uneven, effortful, interrupted, nonlinear, or visibly scaffolded thinking—becomes subject to ordinary moral judgment long before any formal ethical violation occurs. Drawing on scholarship in disability studies, neurodiversity, academic evaluation, and generative AI, the article examines how hiring, productivity regimes, peer review, and everyday collegial interactions normalize particular cognitive styles while rendering visible forms of cognitive dependence professionally suspect. It argues that academic ethics should move beyond misconduct-centered frameworks to examine how legitimate cognition is socially produced, morally evaluated, and unevenly regulated through the ordinary evaluative cultures of academic institutions.
The rapid integration of sophisticated generative artificial intelligence (AI) into mainstream digital life presents escalating challenges to traditional notions of authorship and academic integrity within higher education. While automated AI detection tools have been developed, their reliability is contested, and they often fail to account for the context-specific aspects of student writing. This study seeks to move beyond a purely technological perspective by exploring how university professors identify the distinguishing features of AI-generated texts within student submissions. Employing a qualitative thematic analysis as articulated by Braun and Clarke (2006), this research is based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 professors from the Faculty of Humanities and Educational Sciences at An-Najah National University in Palestine. The key findings reveal a detection process that synthesizes textual and contextual evidence by combining objective textual indicators with subjective pedagogical assessments. Professors report a reliance on identifying objective markers such as unnatural “linguistic smoothness,” patterns of sophisticated fabrication and citation “hallucinations,” and stylistic redundancy, while also observing the subjective absence of a critical authorial voice. Furthermore, the findings highlight the significant role of subjective contextual intuition and the ethical and emotional challenges educators face. These results carry significant implications for the development of human-informed detection strategies, the urgent need to evolve pedagogical practices to foster critical AI literacy, and the formulation of clear, and fair institutional policies on AI utilization in academic work.
The emergence of AI-infused academic writing has redirected scholarly attention from technical implementation toward ethical considerations and critical reflection. However, ethical standards in this domain remain fragmented. This study revisits the ethical boundaries and disclosure practices of AI-infused academic writing. Following the PRISMA 2020 guideline, a bibliometric analysis of 267 Scopus-indexed publications released between 2022 and early 2026 was conducted. Data were analysed using Biblioshiny and VOSviewer to examine trends, contributors, citation dynamics, and dominant thematic structures within the field. The results reveal a growth in publications since 2023, accompanied by a thematic transition from technological exploration to ethical and pedagogical reflection. The findings also indicate conceptual fragmentation across disciplines but demonstrate increasing intellectual maturity. The prominence of Asian researchers reflects a geographic shift in the discourse on AI ethics. These insights highlight the need for an integrative theoretical framework that harmonizes innovation, pedagogy, and ethics in AI-infused academic writing.
As GenAI tools become readily accessible and increasingly integrated into higher education teaching, learning, and assessment, significant concerns and debates have emerged about their implications for academic integrity. In this context, recent years have witnessed a rapidly expanding field of research on higher education student experiences, perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, concerns, or practices related to academic integrity in the use of GenAI. This scoping review maps this field by analysing 38 empirical studies on student voices on academic integrity in the use of GenAI. The review reveals a complex, dynamic landscape of student understandings, attitudes, perceptions, concerns, and practices regarding academic integrity in the use of GenAI in higher education. Overall, student voices on issues of academic integrity in using GenAI reveal their struggles, negotiations, and adaptations as they navigate an ethical ‘grey zone’. Students emerge not as passive recipients of GenAI technology or institutional policies, nor as culprits who breach academic integrity without ethical constraints, but as active agents who seek to interpret, adapt, and shape the ethical contours of GenAI use in their studies. Meanwhile, the gaps between students’ ethical awareness and their practices of compromising academic integrity, as well as their rationalisations of these gaps, are notable. Studies also show that student voices are shaped by intersecting demographic, psychological, and contextual factors, highlighting the need for differentiated policies and educational responses that recognise students as partners in developing and implementing policies and educational approaches to address the challenges of academic integrity entailed by GenAI.
Incivility challenges the climate and culture of the higher education workplace, often negatively impacting faculty productivity and overall job satisfaction. This study investigated the prevalence, types, and sources of workplace incivility experienced by university faculty. Findings indicated incivility, in the form of added responsibilities, exclusion, and undermining professional integrity, that impacts all demographic groups and ranks. However, given the non-probability sampling approach and the response rate, the study is not positioned to support population-level inference. Administrators were identified as the primary source of incivility, as faculty reported decreased productivity, reduced confidence, and strained relationships. Implications suggest that addressing incivility in higher education should include leadership training, fostering supportive environments, and creating organizational mechanisms to report incivility without fear of retaliation.
This study examines how large language models (LLMs) and humans differ in their emotional responses when resolving moral dilemmas in medical education. Medical students and LLMs were presented with the classic trolley and bridge dilemmas, and their responses were compared with expert-written academic texts using sentiment analysis to assess emotional tone and patterns. Students’ answers exhibited the highest emotional intensity, marked by fear and sadness, while LLMs responded with low emotional involvement, characterized by anticipation and trust. Expert texts displayed a more neutral and balanced emotional tone, intermediate between student and LLM responses. These findings suggest that human experts adopt a reflective, emotionally regulated approach to moral reasoning, whereas medical students respond with greater emotional intensity, reflecting their developmental stage. LLMs, by contrast, analyze dilemmas through factual reasoning largely devoid of affective depth. Integrating AI tools with emotional-awareness training may therefore enhance medical education in addressing ethical complexity. Introduction.
This study aims to describe doctoral students’ experiences with human-AI collaborative writing (HAICW) and to examine their perceptions of ethics and authenticity in both AI-supported scientific writing practices and their professional domains. Using a narrative inquiry design, this study involved four doctoral students majoring in English Language Education, who met several inclusion criteria. We conducted interviews to collect the data, which were then analyzed using a deductive thematic analysis. We applied member checking to make the analysis results more rigorous and reliable. This study found that all participants agreed that HAICW has reshaped academic authorship into a collaborative space where human cognition and artificial intelligence interact through ethically grounded practices. They also emphasized that ethics and authenticity of scientific writing in the AI era should be repositioned, moving from textual originality to cognitive transparency, moral practices, and intellectual ownership, echoing a moral compass and a professional identity marker that sustains credibility, public trust, and scholarly integrity in an AI-mediated academic world. These findings are expected to be a reference for higher education to foster ethical, transparent, and authentic AI-integrated authorship beyond the rigid technicalities.
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence has refuelled the decades-long debates surrounding academic integrity in scholarship. In the 21st century, as a multifaceted phenomenon, plagiarism now extends beyond mere copy-and-paste behaviour to include recycling assignments and incorporating AI-generated works. With the academic misconduct domino effect, such as plagiarism behaviour, having severe consequences for students, academics, and higher education institutions, going beyond assessment marks to drastically alter standards of scholarship and institutional reputation. Within the discipline of geography, the integrity landscape is shaped by its methodological pluralism and is thus not limited to a single compliance issue. Therefore, using the neutralisation theory, the study examined geography students’ perceptions of plagiarism at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, with a special focus on its association with demographic variables and attendance at anti-plagiarism training within the institution. Using survey data from 337 participants, nonparametric statistical tests were employed to test for significant differences across the four hypotheses. The findings indicate statistical differences across all the variables. The study offers insight into views on academic dishonesty amongst geography students at the university and how demographics and training workshops on such topics shape these perceptions, which contribute to the international discourse on academic ethics and integrity in higher education. Clinical trial number: N/A.
This study examines gender and geographic representation on the editorial boards of selected Artificial Intelligence (AI) journals, focusing on overall composition, leadership roles, and country affiliation. Analysis of 4,420 editorial board members revealed a pronounced gender imbalance: men occupied 86.15
We conducted an updated survey in 2024 to assess the evolving perceptions of academic misconduct among Chinese biomedical researchers, following previous nationwide surveys in 2010 and 2015. Using a consistent 10-item questionnaire, 1,000 researchers participated in an online cross-sectional study. Responses from the 2024 survey were systematically compared with those obtained in 2010 and 2015 to identify temporal trends. Compared with the earlier surveys, more participants in 2024 believed that academic misconduct was less severe (60.2
As large language-models (“LLMs”) become increasingly capable of producing publishable scholarship, researchers have acquired the ability to personalize LLMs with their own style and academic values to generate entire manuscripts: a practice this paper calls “persona authorship.” This paper investigates whether submitting such AI-generated manuscripts in the humanities under the human author’s name, especially without disclosure, constitutes intrinsic research misconduct. Surveying four examples of research misconduct—deception, fraud, negligence, and corruption—this paper argues that persona authorship does not clearly violate any fundamental norms of academic research, at least not necessarily more than traditional (human) authorship commonly does. In particular, persona authorship need not be wrongfully deceptive; it does not clearly constitute serious fraud; it need not be inherently more negligent than similar, human-authored work; and the corruption it threatens may be mitigated or avoided. This paper concludes that persona authorship is not obviously a case of serious research misconduct, but cautions that its widespread adoption may exacerbate systemic problems in academic publishing, such as overproduction of unimportant or insular work and further marginalization of scholars who do not have access to high-end AI tools. Therefore, scholars must adapt proactively, in the face of this impending AI integration, to preserve the health and vitality of humanities scholarship.
Upholding academic integrity during medical training is essential to the development of ethical and professional physicians. Yet, academic dishonesty remains a global concern in medical schools, with implications for both academic and clinical practice. This scoping review mapped and summarized evidence on interventions promoting academic integrity among undergraduate medical students. Following Arksey and O’Malley’s framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, a systematic search was conducted in PubMed, Scopus, and ERIC. Eligible studies were charted and analyzed through narrative synthesis. The included studies described three main types of measures: curricular interventions, modifications to assessment methods, and institutional strategies. Most showed improvements in students’ knowledge, attitudes, or perceptions of academic integrity, particularly regarding plagiarism and exam cheating. However, interventions were heterogeneous, context-specific, and rarely included long-term follow-up or rigorous evaluation. Promoting academic integrity in medical education requires comprehensive, context-adapted approaches integrating curricular innovations, fair assessment reforms, and sustained institutional policies. Despite positive short-term outcomes, major gaps persist in standardized pedagogical frameworks, longitudinal evaluation, and evidence on sustainability. Future research should prioritize systematic and culturally sensitive strategies to ensure the ethical formation of future physicians.
This paper conceptualizes academic integrity culture as an institutional moral condition constituted through the alignment of regulative–structural arrangements and normative–cognitive expectations across organizational levels. Drawing on the literature on ethical culture and moral order, it develops an account of academic integrity as sustained through the coupling of formal governance structures and informal peer-regulatory processes and reproduced over time through routinized practice and socialization. The paper develops a conceptual measurement model that treats academic integrity institutionalization as a latent construct and specifies its observable indicators. It further articulates a verification logic that clarifies the inferential conditions under which such indicators can support claims of cultural institutionalization. An institutional illustration shows how convergent, longitudinal, and multi-level indicators may be interpreted in relation to processes of stabilization and norm reproduction. The paper concludes by outlining the methodological and ethical implications of treating academic integrity as a cultural property of universities and clarifying the institutional responsibilities that such claims entail.
Academic freedom is essential for higher education and research. The ethos of the academic profession and the ability to exercise it depend not only on autonomy from external influences, such as political control, but also on individual and collegial autonomy within higher education institutions (HEIs). This study provides new and in-depth insights into how norms within the internal decision-making processes of HEIs affect the freedom of academic teachers and researchers to exercise their academic ethos. We explore how members of the academic profession perceive their professional ethos and respond to competing values within their organisations. Empirically, the study is based on semi-structured interviews with academic teachers and researchers, using a comparative design that highlights differences in internal decision-making processes in Sweden. A key finding is that the organisational design of HEIs affects the content and status of individual academic ethos within the institution. Furthermore, at the organisational level, our respondents are confronted with the complexity and variation of competing norm systems. As a result, they develop patterns of resistance, such as collegial pockets within line-managed organisations. The study contributes to the theoretical literature on academic professionalism by refining and empirically operationalising the concept of competing organisational ethoses within higher education institutions. Building on the foundational typologies developed by scholars of academic professionalism and organisational sociology, we provide a nuanced framework that distinguishes between academic, public sector, and market ethoses along four analytical dimensions: values, role perception, organisational form, and control.
Academic misconduct remains a widespread issue in higher education globally. Although numerous academic integrity interventions have been developed, few studies compare the relative benefits and impact of different programs, which include educational modules, discussions, and simulations. The present study compared six instructional interventions, that varied in delivery format (including online, virtual, and in-person), as well as instructional tools (including modules, discussions, and simulations) for both self-report measures (e.g., knowledge learned) and an objective cheating measure. Overall, undergraduate students (N = 299) demonstrated gains in knowledge and confidence regarding academic integrity across interventions but attention during the presentations was greatest for in person interventions. Some students showed cheating behavior (ranging between 9.5
The study investigates authorship patterns, geographic distribution, and educational qualifications of contributors to predatory journals in India, with a focus on understanding the ethical and academic implications of such publishing practices. The primary objectives were to analyze gender disparities in authorship, evaluate professional backgrounds, explore subject-area trends, and assess the regional distribution of publications in predatory journals. A two-stage methodology was employed, beginning with the random selection of journals from Cabell’s list of predatory outlets. A total of 400 articles from four journals were chosen, and comprehensive metadata, including gender, profession, affiliation, and qualifications, was gathered. The genderize.io tool was used to assist in gender classification, while both quantitative and qualitative approaches were applied to examine authorship trends, professional roles, publication topics, and geographic distribution. Key findings revealed a dominance of male authors in senior academic positions, while female authors were more frequently represented in junior roles. Prominent subject areas included Engineering, Law, and Computer Applications. The highest number of publications came from states like Tamil Nadu and Telangana, indicating regional variations in predatory publishing practices. Despite a significant proportion of authors holding Ph.D. degrees, missing and incomplete metadata pointed to a lack of transparency and editorial oversight in these journals. The study provides valuable insights into the systemic issues underlying predatory publishing.
Professionalism and ethical reasoning are core competencies in medical education, yet evidence from Palestine is limited. This cross-sectional study surveyed 441 medical students from five accredited universities (≥ 4th year, hospital-based training) using a structured questionnaire that included demographics, professionalism items, and 12 case-based scenarios adapted from clinical practice and professional guidelines. An Ethical Reasoning Score (ERS; range 0–12) was derived from correct responses. Descriptive, chi-square, and logistic regression analyses were applied. Students performed well in basic scenarios but showed weaker reasoning in domains such as digital professionalism and interpersonal etiquette. Higher ERS was significantly associated with prior ethics training (p = 0.001), female gender, and inter-university variation. Findings indicate uneven ethical competence among Palestinian medical students, underscoring the need for scenario-based teaching, targeted curricular reform, and inter-university collaboration to strengthen professionalism and ethical reasoning.
