In recent years, Serbia has appeared more and more often in news stories about violations of research ethics: plagiarism in the dissertations of high-ranking officials, purchased authorship, mass retractions of publications, dubious international collaborations, and studies verging on scientific curiosities. And also — mass political persecution of scholars and university teachers. Are these episodes accidental, or are they manifestations of one and the same problem? Plagiat-Navigator tried to make sense of the situation.

Any account of the current situation with academic misconduct in Serbia has to begin with the story of the doctoral dissertation of Sinisa Mali, then the mayor of Belgrade and now the country’s first deputy prime minister. After “terrible plagiarism” was found in his work, the familiar bureaucratic game began: academic bodies dragged out a decision for years. But in the end, under public pressure and in the face of irrefutable evidence, the ethics committee of the University of Belgrade did annul his doctoral degree. By that time, Mali had already become finance minister. Soon afterward, Serbia’s Constitutional Court overturned the university’s decision. Apparently having lost faith in his own country’s academic system, Mali — by then Serbia’s first deputy prime minister — went to defend a new dissertation… in Slovakia. The Serbian authorities immediately recognized the Slovak diploma. The saga has been going on for more than a decade, and it is not over yet. But it has already become a textbook example of how political weight can cast doubt on the very idea of academic integrity.

Sinisa Mali. Photo: Vreme

Not all stories about plagiarism in the work of Serbian officials end well. Filip Svarm, editor-in-chief of the weekly Vreme, and journalist Nemanja Rujevic, who published the investigation “Anatomy of a Dissertation,” were less fortunate. Former politician Jelena Trivan, now CEO of Serbia’s largest mobile operator and the subject of that investigation, sued the journalists at the end of 2024 and won 80,000 dinars for an infringement of her honor, dignity, and business reputation. At the same time, the court did not question the fact of the borrowings themselves. It concluded, however, that only specialists have the right to classify a scholarly work as plagiarism, while journalists do not have such authority.

University of Belgrade professor Aleksandar Kavcic called what was happening “a war of laypeople against scientists”: a country where ignorance is celebrated and ministers are people who “like to wave around purchased and plagiarized diplomas.”

Plagiarism in Serbia’s academic environment is not limited to politicians’ dissertations. The buying and selling of scientific publications is an even more acute problem. This may be why Professor Kavcic, speaking of colleagues in the field, diplomatically noted that the difference between a real scientist and someone who has acquired knowledge “third hand” is enormous.

Plagiat-Navigator has already written about such “third hands” — the Moscow exchange trading in scientific publications and authorship slots — in the article “Hirsch Index at Market Rate.” One of the figures in that story was Marko Milojevic, a professor at Singidunum University in Belgrade. The case concerned two publications in international scientific journals in which Milojevic purchased authorship in 2021 through the Moscow exchange. A closer analysis shows that, in at least six publications, Professor Milojevic shares authorship with Russian colleagues who regularly use the services of the Moscow firm.

Yet the Moscow trail is only the tip of the iceberg. Following a global trend, Serbian scholars have recently shifted from the Russian market to the more powerful and influential Asian markets for fake publications. In a recent study of retracted papers with Iranian affiliations in computer science, the authors concluded that Serbia ranks among the leaders in the number of jointly published questionable papers, second only to Malaysia. This is hardly surprising: the “paper mill” from the Iranian city of Ardabil, exposed in 2023, also worked actively with Serbian colleagues. The result was the mass retraction of 31 papers in Genetika, the official journal of the Serbian Genetics Society, which lost its impact factor because of “compromised” peer review and citation manipulation.

Manipulation of peer review, authorship, and citation in publications by Serbian scholars has been observed not only in Genetika. Several examples of such papers, retracted from various journals for this reason, are shown below. It should be noted that Russian scientists also appeared as co-authors alongside their Serbian colleagues in these papers.

The compromising of publication procedures is only one item in a long list of dishonest practices used to pull the wool over the eyes of journal reviewers and editors.

Consider another characteristic example: in 2024, experts found numerous distortions of established scientific expressions — so-called tortured phrases — in a paper by Professor Nebojsa Bacanin, vice-rector for research at Belgrade’s Singidunum University. This is a clear sign that the authors were trying to evade plagiarism-detection systems using automated paraphrasing. But, as often happens, the software malfunctioned: it paraphrased the text while leaving abbreviations unchanged, so that they no longer matched their expansions. For example, instead of convolutional neural network (CNN), the text produced the meaningless phrase convolutional brain organization (CNN). Such blunders are the calling card of texts written not by scientists but by algorithms. Incidentally, another paper by Vice-Rector Bacanin was found to contain numerous manipulations with irrelevant bibliographic references.

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The problem, however, is not only how the articles are written, but also how their number is artificially inflated. The inflation of publication activity in Serbian science does not do without a zoo — and what follows is not a figure of speech. The use of metaheuristics inspired by animal behavior is a frequently used method for artificially increasing the number of publications. Many such algorithms are described extremely superficially, while their novelty and applicability to a wide range of tasks raise serious doubts. In most cases, the proposed method differs little from long-known algorithms, and its supposed originality comes down to a new metaphor and fresh terminology. A significant share of such works are merely minor modifications of the well-known Particle Swarm Optimization method.

A telling example: in a 2026 paper by scientists from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Serbia, the authors took an interest in the behavior of the spider-tailed horned viper and applied this metaphor to photovoltaic water-pumping systems. It sounds like science fiction, but it is a real publication in a scientific journal. Notably, among the co-authors of the paper we once again find the already familiar Professor Bacanin, vice-rector of Singidunum University.

Nor is the story free of image manipulation. In a joint Iranian-Italian article whose authors include a single representative of Serbia — University of Belgrade professor Jelena Popovic-Djordjevic — experts found telltale traces of Photoshop, the same techniques that have surfaced more than once in similar scandals.

Jelena Popovic-Djordjevic. Photo: ResearchGate

It is worth noting that since 2020 Popovic-Djordjevic has been a constant co-author of Sina Moghaddam, an Iranian specialist in medicinal plants. The scheme is transparent: the participation of European scientists helps Asian authors break into prestigious journals. At the same time, the real contribution of the Western colleagues to the research is often minimal. Their role is reduced to status presence — a kind of “wedding general” at an academic wedding. Until 2020, this honorary function in Moghaddam’s publications was performed by a researcher from Greece. The outcome was entirely predictable: nine of their joint papers have already been retracted, and they have received scathing criticism on Retraction Watch. Now the baton has passed to Popovic-Djordjevic.

It should be added that image manipulation in her papers is not only an Iranian specialty. In a paper signed by ten employees of the University of Belgrade, a curious fact emerged: an image previously used to illustrate liver samples migrated unchanged into a new article — this time as an illustration of kidney samples. The authors were not at a loss: they apologized for an “unfortunate error” and corrected the article.

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The roots of this tradition of errors, however, run deeper. Back in 2003, one of the co-authors of the aforementioned paper about the liver — now a professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Belgrade, and then a researcher at Queen Mary University of London — Zoran Todorovic, together with his British colleague Christoph Thiemermann, published a paper in which experts also found image manipulation, again involving liver samples. In response to puzzled questions from reviewers, Professor Thiemermann replied with lethal directness: the results of the study, by his own admission, “may not be reliable.” Since then, more than 80 negative PubPeer comments have accumulated on his papers, 15 of which have ultimately been retracted. Techniques honed at a British university, it seems, proved useful in Belgrade twenty years later.

One reliable sign of dishonest publication activity is a sharp rise in the number of papers co-authored with representatives of countries in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, around 2021–2022. In such papers, authorship is often shared by researchers from a good dozen countries — a kind of academic international, assembled by chance around a single publication.

The graph above shows the distribution of the number of papers by Serbian authors co-authored with colleagues from Asia and Africa, depending on the number of co-authoring countries. By a large margin, the leaders in the number of papers are two mathematicians from the University of Belgrade: Professors Dragan Pamucar and Vladimir Simic. The sharp surge in their publication activity falls precisely at the beginning of the 2020s. And if experts find elementary mathematical errors in their papers, there is nothing surprising about it: at a productivity rate of three papers a week, it is simply impossible not to make mistakes. PubPeer has already accumulated claims against a hundred of their publications in international journals, ten of which have now been officially retracted. It seems that in this case quantity really did turn into quality.

To conclude this theme, let us talk a little with plants — yes, yes, do not be surprised. Scientists from Slovenia, Serbia (the universities in Nis and Belgrade), and the University of Pristina decided to find out together whether plants are capable of talking to people in their own language. To do this, they attached a polygraph to the stem of a potted flower and asked the plant questions: “Are you alive?”, “Do you have consciousness?”, “Does it hurt?” The plant was interrogated using a radioactive source of a uranium isotope. The answers obtained were decoded with the help of AI, which translated them into Serbian. To avoid suffering from radiation themselves, the authors of the study used a homemade orgonite — a bioenergetic shield that transforms negative energy into positive energy.

The researchers’ first important discovery was observing how the experimental “vegetable” — this is exactly how they familiarly referred to the potted plant under study — sweated and changed its pulse and breathing rate. All of this was recorded using a polygraph. As a result, the Balkan scientists concluded that plants can be engaged in a rational dialogue in their own language. The results of the study were published in a scientific journal devoted to issues of… acupuncture.

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Behind all these scandalous stories, it should not be forgotten that the majority of Serbian scientists and university teachers are honest professionals who have nothing to do with plagiarism, purchased papers, or other manipulations. The events of the past two years have clearly confirmed this: many of them proved willing to risk their own careers in defense of academic freedoms and democratic principles.

The mass student protests that began in Serbia in November 2024 after the collapse of a canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad quickly grew into a nationwide movement against corruption and political pressure on state institutions. Universities became one of the main centers of protest activity: lecturers openly supported the students, while rectors and deans refused to obstruct university blockades. In response, the authorities and pro-government media launched a campaign against the academic community.

Political pressure was not limited to public attacks. At a number of universities, teachers who spoke out in support of students faced refusals to reappoint them, dismissals, and delays in career advancement. The best-known case was that of Jelena Kleut, a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Novi Sad, who lost her job after twenty years of teaching; she herself called what happened a political reprisal. These actions by the Serbian authorities, aimed at suppressing academic freedoms, attracted the attention of international organizations: the European Parliament and the human rights network Scholars at Risk documented an escalation of threats against Serbian scholars, publishing reports on a systemic crisis of freedom of speech.

All these stories are elements of a single ecosystem in which formal indicators replace real science, violations meet no serious resistance, and universities and courts sometimes side with the violators. Politicians themselves, by their own example, have demonstrated for decades that academic integrity is worth nothing if you have power. With this signal, they have been corroding the academic community for years, setting “their own” careerists against those who refused to play their game. It would be a mistake to think that the entire academic community has resigned itself to this state of affairs. But, unfortunately, for now the dialogue between the former and the latter looks more like a conversation with plants.

The post “Are You Alive?” Talking Plants, Purchased Papers, and Repression: What Is Happening to Serbian Science appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

In Georgia’s academic world, an entire industry of research fraud hides behind the mask of high citation indices, prestigious journals, and academy memberships. Professors with international reputations use crude distortions, AI-generated images of geese instead of scientific graphs, and blatant plagiarism to churn out publications and secure grants. Plagiat-Navigator tried to make sense of the situation that has developed in Georgia.

UPD 21.05.2026. The original version of this article was released by the editors prematurely. After receiving feedback from readers, we realized that the text needed further editing and clarification of information. We apologize for insufficiently precise wording and for several errors.

Fake science disguises itself as immaculate respectability. Today’s academic impostors have mastered the language of grants, citation indices, and bureaucratic reports. They publish in prestigious journals and, at first glance, are indistinguishable from genuine researchers. Their papers look solid, their graphs and formulas convincing, and their references lead to authoritative sources. Common sense or journalistic intuition is no longer enough to tell a fake from genuine research. Specialized analytical tools and professional expertise in research ethics are required.

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Professor Ozgur Kisi of Ilia State University (ISU), a holder of a Doctor of Sciences degree, was recognized in 2021 as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate and has consistently ranked among the world’s top 2% of scientists according to Stanford University (2020–2025). Thanks to more than 600 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, numerous book chapters, and presentations at international conferences, Professor Kisi’s h-index has exceeded 100. In addition, Ozgur Kisi is a full member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. At first glance, he would seem to be a model of an impeccable, highly productive researcher.

But scientific articles published by Professor Kisi in recent years attracted the attention of Plagiat-Navigator because they contained so-called “tortured phrases.” Such phrases arise when words are mechanically replaced with synonyms, often making the text absurd and unnatural. For example, in one scientific article, “optimal settings” becomes “optical services.” In another paper, birds — whose flock is commonly used in the scientific literature to illustrate the operation of an optimization algorithm — become “feathered animals.”

If these cases of synonymization can, with great effort, still somehow be explained away, then “variation of σ2” in Professor Kisi’s article, used instead of “variance σ2” as it appeared in someone else’s paper published five years earlier, loses all meaning. The source of the absurdity was a systematic strategy of paraphrasing other people’s texts through synonym substitution — a widespread method used to bypass plagiarism-detection systems. Using this technique, Kisi and his co-authors altered not only this phrase but also a large section of another author’s text describing the relevance vector methodology. Other persuasive examples of similar masking by Professor Kisi and his co-authors can be seen here.

It is not only the phrasing that becomes absurd, but also the figures in the professor’s publications. Thus, instead of a diagram comparing predicted and observed data values, the reader is invited to admire geese flying in a wedge formation. It should be added that this article is not about geese at all, but about hummingbirds — which, moreover, never fly in wedge formations.

When discussing manipulations with images, one should also mention Professor Kisi’s university colleague, the ethnobotany professor and fellow highly cited scholar Rainer Bussmann, who studied rare medicinal herbs of the Himalayas but for some reason used images from the internet in his article (see the figure below). That article was retracted by the journal’s editors. But similar things can also be found in other publications by Professor Bussmann.

Example of an image used in a scientific article that had circulated widely on the internet several years before the article was published.

Of course, image fabrication is not practiced only at Ilia State University. Below is an example from an article co-authored by Fariborz Sharifianjazi, a professor at the University of Georgia. As the figure shows, the image is assembled from repeated elements, suggesting the likely use of AI to generate it.

Identical image fragments used to illustrate results obtained under different conditions.

The journal’s editors retracted this article. But the true master of figure fabrication in Georgia’s academic environment may be considered Samad Haksar, a professor at the same University of Georgia, who chose a highly original way to conceal traces of falsified experimental spectra. The following figure shows an example of two matching random background patterns in spectra. In the lower one, the author of the scientific article manually cut off the protruding details — the fluctuations — in order to hide traces of research fraud. In scientific practice, the coincidence of random noise patterns in independent experiments is statistically impossible. Their identity is direct evidence of fabrication. An experienced scientist first notices the matching background patterns by the protruding fluctuations in the spectrum. That is why the more sophisticated falsifiers manually remove everything extra from the spectrum that sticks out and catches the eye.

Example of two matching random background patterns in spectra. In the lower one, the author of the scientific article manually cut off the fluctuations in order to conceal traces of research fraud.

Two typical episodes add further evidence of the systemic nature of what is happening, illustrating the most common forms of academic fraud. In the first case, a journal editor discovered that some authors, including Georgia’s most prominent and authoritative economist, had been quietly added to the author list shortly before publication. In the second case, the editor of another journal discovered that literally on the eve of publication, the authors had changed the bibliography without coordinating the change with the editorial office. More than two dozen references to the works of one of the article’s co-authors — a professor at the University of Georgia — had been added to the list. In both cases, the articles were retracted by the journals. These two cases are mentioned here to illustrate the most widespread method of scientific fraud: guest authorship and excessive citation. Both of these services are most often purchased from dealers trading in scientific publications, authorship, and bibliographic references to them.

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In Russia, according to investigations by Dissernet, more than 200 university rectors have fake dissertations or publications containing large-scale plagiarism. Not one of them has suffered any consequences for it. On the contrary, they continue to run universities, sit on expert councils, and receive state support. In this respect, Georgia appears, with some delay, to be confidently copying the Russian model. Falsifiers are successfully occupying state-funded posts and receiving privileges — and for that reason their activities require systematic work by professionals and targeted academic auditing.

The post Geese Instead of Hummingbirds and Optical Services: How Georgia Rewards Imitators of Science appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.

Forced disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades. In 2019, something remarkable happened: Twenty-one disappeared people were found, alive. They had been toiling in narco-slavery camps, an under-covered aspect of Mexico’s illicit drug trade. But there wasn’t a happy ending. (This story was originally published in Spanish by Quinto Elemento Lab):

Freedom had not been kind to the captives. Few had been able to regain even the wretched standard of living that had pushed them into the arms of the cartels in the first place. Many were scarred by paranoia, trapped in addiction or suffering mental illnesses. Some had been abandoned by their partners or families. More than one, we learned, died after being rescued, some by their own hand. We came to feel that these men had been triply betrayed: first by the narcos who had lured them into the mountains, then by the government that failed to look for them, and finally by a society that refused to welcome them back into its fold.

We are telling their stories not because we hope to secure justice, but simply to establish the truth. This was a modest ambition shared by one of our interlocutors, Andrés. He told us that many of the survivors’ accounts had been doubted. He’d even read criticisms on social media: That’s what they deserve for being shiftless and lazy. “Those people should try thinking before they speak, because they don’t know when they might suddenly find themselves in a similar situation,” Andrés said. “They might be lucky enough to be rescued, or unlucky enough to die out there. I decided to give this interview because this situation’s not going to change. In Mexico, there’s sexual slavery, human trafficking, forced labour. This didn’t start yesterday; it’s been going on for many years.” 

A questionable publication in Nature, several fake images, a professor with a dozen suspicious papers, a phantom author with an h-index who turns out to be a Zenit football fan from a fan website — this is not an isolated oddity, but part of a system, a cross-section of today’s Belgian academic environment. More in the latest installment of Plagiarism Navigator.

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One of the latest critical comments on PubPeer, a platform for post-publication peer review, concerns a study by Belgian researchers at KU Leuven, one of Belgium’s largest and most prestigious universities.

Experts noticed something odd: an image of the vascular network around tumor nodules in mouse lungs appeared twice, even though the authors said the images had been obtained under different laboratory conditions. The second image was a mirrored version of the first, rotated clockwise and dimmed.

Researchers sometimes use such tricks to conceal traces of scientific misconduct. Nature Communications, which published the results of this study in 2025, is a prestigious top-tier interdisciplinary journal with a high impact factor of 14.7. One would like to believe this was merely an unfortunate technical error, especially since the Belgian authors of the paper had not previously been caught in similar manipulations. But it is not that simple.

Among the eleven authors of the publication, one name stands out: Anna Sablina. Her record includes more than a dozen papers in which experts have found signs of image manipulation. Who is she?

According to For Better Science, shortly after defending her Candidate of Sciences dissertation in Moscow, Anna Sablina left Russia. She first worked as a postdoc in the United States, and from 2009 as an associate professor at KU Leuven. She is now a full professor and heads her own laboratory.

Here is another example showing that the methods of “working” with images in Sablina’s co-authored publications have changed little over the years. The figure below shows histological sections of mouse embryo skin: normal embryos on the left, and embryos with the loss of one copy of the gene on the right. The two images partially overlap when one is rotated clockwise, which should not happen.

In 2020, this paper was published in Circulation Research, a prestigious journal and leading outlet in cardiovascular and translational biology, with a five-year impact factor of 20.8. Among its co-authors we find another name: Mikhail Steklov, a former employee of the K. A. Timiryazev Institute of Plant Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and now a postdoc at the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology in Ghent, Belgium. Steklov also has several PubPeer comments in which experts have noticed signs of image manipulation.

Even so, Steklov still has a long way to go before catching up with Professor Sablina. Sablina appears to have persuaded even some Belgian researchers of the effectiveness of her methods. One of them is Professor Francis Impens of Ghent University, who, like his colleagues Sablina and Steklov, has repeatedly been flagged on PubPeer. One of Impens’s papers was published in Nature, whose impact factor exceeds 50, making it one of the world’s most prestigious and highly cited scientific journals.

Here is an example of image manipulation from that paper. The figure below shows a histological analysis of papillomas from three different tissues. But two of the three images partially overlap when rotated, which should not happen.

None of the papers mentioned above, published mainly by teams of Belgian scientists, has been retracted. The only paper by Professor Sablina that has been retracted was co-authored with Chinese scientists. It was withdrawn a year after publication at the request of Sablina’s co-authors. The retraction note states: “We discovered that the data presented in Fig. 1C, Fig. 2D and Fig. 4A in the manuscript were inappropriately manipulated. These manipulations are contrary to the journal’s policy.” Unlike their Belgian colleagues, the Chinese scientists were ultimately prepared to acknowledge their mistakes.

China is also linked to another amusing and instructive story involving KU Leuven and Russia. Several years ago, scientific papers began appearing in various academic journals in which a certain Anthony Lam, a young professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven, was listed as a co-author of Chinese researchers. It soon turned out that no such professor existed at the university.

Nor, for that matter, did he exist at any other university in the world. The Chinese authors had simply invented him, taking the photograph from a Russian football fan website, where it showed a certain Bleder Yakovlevich Kanalgeruch.

The fictional author is shown on the left; on the right is his prototype from a Russian football fan website.

The name on the fan website was probably invented as well: translated from German, and possibly from Yiddish, Kanalgeruch literally means “sewer stench,” while Blöder means “fool” or “stupid person.” Most of those papers were later retracted. But now we know this: Zenit fan Bleder Yakovlevich Kanalgeruch has an h-index of eight. By this academic metric, Kanalgeruch even outperforms some members of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

A curious detail: one of the papers authored by the fictional Belgian professor Anthony Lam was published in 2021 in the Russian journal Izvestiya Vuzov. Fizika. This may well be the only journal in the world that never bothered to retract a paper with a fake co-author.

Taking all these circumstances together, one is led to suspect that the fictional Belgian professor — and the subsequent promotion of publications under his name — were the product of a paper mill involving Russians with a strong sense of humor.

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To be fair, questionable publication practices are entering the European academic environment not only from the post-Soviet space. The problem is much broader. In recent years, Belgian universities have increasingly faced forms of academic misconduct whose roots lie in countries in Asia and North Africa.

As researchers from these countries move to Belgium for postdoctoral, teaching, or faculty positions, they sometimes bring with them academic norms shaped in their previous environments — including a tolerance for plagiarism, fictitious co-authorship, publications in dubious journals, and the artificial inflation of publication records.

Here is just one, but telling, example. Professor Hamada AbdElgawad has worked at the University of Antwerp for more than ten years. Yet even after such a long period, experts continue to find serious violations in his publications.

For example, in a 2023 paper published in Molecules, a Swiss journal indexed in Scopus, and co-authored with his Egyptian colleagues, the Belgian professor used a scanning electron microscope image taken from someone else’s article, published several years earlier and devoted to entirely different experimental conditions.

Experts also find in the professor’s record images borrowed from the internet, data falsification, manipulations with experimental spectra, and obvious conflicts of interest. It should be noted that in most such publications, AbdElgawad is the only representative of a European university. The other co-authors come from various countries in the Middle East.

This situation is typical of Asian paper mills, which use some Western European co-authors to give their publications greater weight.

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Of course, the cases described above concern a minority of individual researchers, not Belgian universities or Belgian scientific schools as a whole. But what is the overall picture? On one side, professors with dozens of suspicious papers, postdocs moving from one institute to another with the same set of “tricks,” and prestigious journals that prefer not to notice the obvious. On the other, the fictional Anthony Lam — also known as Bleder Yakovlevich Kanalgeruch.

The absurdity of this situation reveals a simple truth: the modern publication system has long been evaluating not so much science itself as the ability to imitate it. The problem is that it takes only a few percent of dishonest scientists and one or two indifferent editors for systematic misconduct to penetrate the system. Belgium is not an exception; it is an indicator of a broader crisis in publication oversight across academia.

As long as retractions remain isolated events that happen only under external pressure, rather than as a result of universities’ own internal checks, stories like these will keep recurring. And each new case is not merely another bad paper, but a quiet erosion of trust in the entire European academic system.

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