Central planning, the failed public sector enterprises model and pervasive bureaucratic corruption are not the only imports of post-independence India from erstwhile Soviet Union. Another deadly import is academic fraud, still common in Russia.

According to a new study, the extraordinary scale of Ph D fraud in Russia can be attributed to the reproduction of near-identical doctoral dissertations within universities. With more than 3,500 falsified theses identified by the anti-plagiarism group Dissernet in the past two years, Ph D forgery is now an “integral part of Russia’s statehood”, rather than a “fringe phenomenon”, according to the analysis published in Higher Education in Russia and Beyond, a quarterly newsletter published by the country’s National Research University Higher School of Economics.

But its author and Dissernet’s founder Andrei Rostovtsev says it’s wrong to think about plagiarism in Russia in the same way as in Western Europe or the US. “Most of the authors under scrutiny by Dissernet have… most probably never written a single page of their dissertations and might have never read them or even seen them at all,” says Prof. Rostovtsev, a physicist based at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Information Transmission Problems.

This type of fraud can be achieved when dissertations defended at one university department (for instance, sociology) are passed to another Ph D candidate in another department (economics) and defended after a few words are changed, he explains. “One notorious ‘scholar’ transformed a dissertation about the confectionery industry into a dissertation about the beef-and-dairy industry by substituting ‘dark chocolate’ with ‘imported beef’ and ‘nut chocolate’ with ‘bone-in beef’,” he says. “All the data, spelling, tables and pictures remained unchanged”, although some authors alter their dating of statistics to make them seem more up-to-date, he adds.

However, Ph D fraud in physics, chemistry and biology is relatively uncommon, according to Rostovtsev’s analysis of cheating authors identified by Dissernet. “Most of the fake dissertations (40 percent) accrue to economics”, with education, law, politics and other social sciences in which Russia is traditionally weak in international journal citation scores, also popular with cheats. “Scallywags prosper in the academic areas where Russia is still lagging behind,” he says, with fraud much smaller in the sciences in which the country’s academy has some international standing.

Dissernet has now built a unique database of plagiarised dissertations and developed a semi-automatic algorithm to detect when editors of pay-to-publish journals — in which unoriginal Ph Ds are routinely published — have been connected with dissertation fraud.