Paper short abstract:

In Africa, the "publish or perish" mindset among academics escalated breaches of research integrity. This paper reports confirmed cases of violations of research integrity and case studies by an author who handled several research grants aimed at developing strategies to tackle academic dishonesty.

Paper long abstract:

Ethical considerations and research integrity are parts of the big issue in academic dishonesty which has generated serious concerns in higher educational institutions and research agencies in Africa. Taking Nigeria as a big mirror of the African continent, there are confirmed and reported cases on the violations of research ethics and integrity by academics in a bid to satisfy personal interest. This paper chronicles several of such cases as well as reports findings from empirical case studies among faculty and students of higher educational institutions. It adopts the Hong Kong five principles (responsible research practices; transparent reporting; open science (open research); valuing a diversity of types of research; and recognizing all contributions to research and scholarly activity) as basis for drawing up questionnaire items for eliciting responses from participants in a bid to measure their compliance with ethical responsibilities and research integrity. This is part of the author’s long-standing research efforts to develop proactive frameworks for checkmating academic dishonesty which attracted research grants from the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) and the National Research Fund (NRF) of Nigeria. From the findings in these previous studies, it was noted that the “punitive sanctions” meted out to culprits who were found guilty of involvement in academic dishonesty have not been deterrent enough. Therefore, the “preventive” approach becomes very pertinent. Several suggestions are made on how the preventive approach could be applied to ensure research integrity and address the question of “responsible research”. Researchers should be responsible to humanity and its survival.