In the last few years, some of the most prominent academics in the country have lost their careers to lacking or even fraudulent research. In 2018, a researcher at Cornell University was found to have manipulated data in many of his studies. This past summer, former Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from his post after accusations that some of the research produced by his lab included data that had been tampered with. Even more recently, former Harvard University president Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarizing throughout her academic career.

While these are only a few high-profile cases, they are also the product of the culture in academia today. With increasingly fewer tenured jobs in research and higher education, researchers feel pressured to publish studies as often as possible, even if their work is low-quality or manipulated.

Ivan Oransky — a distinguished journalist in residence at NYU and co-founder of Retraction Watch, a publication that tracks retractions in research journals — said that the more published research a university has, the better its ranking and national reputation will be, incentivizing professors to publish more to advance their careers. 

“The metric of needing to publish, in particular, is a very important one for individual researchers,” Oransky told WSN. “It’s how they’re judged. It’s how they get promoted and how they get you career advancement of one kind or another.”

In 2011, a study published by Career Development International found that 74% of respondents — all faculty from research-oriented business schools in the United States like NYU — “strongly agreed” that they felt pressure to publish research in peer-reviewed academic journals, and 20% more “agreed” with the sentiment. In the view of most respondents, professors who fail to do so are denied tenure.

At NYU, more than $1 billion is spent on research each year, and the university produced 3,359 pieces of research in 2023 between professors in various fields. Tarek Abdoun, a civil and urban engineering professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, said that the university not only looks at the number of publications a professor has, but also what publications their work appears in. 

“There are certain activities we as faculty are required to do to demonstrate our accomplishments or unique performance,” Abdoun said in an interview with WSN. “But on the other hand, there is also a mechanism to [avoid] things like low-quality research, or even publishing things which might not be realistic or correct, which we call peer review.”

While professors try to publish more in the hopes of securing tenure, many universities are hiring fewer full-time professors. The number of full-time and tenured positions, which can offer more job security and better pay, have decreased in favor of part-time and contract-based positions.