FOR over two years, McMaster University has been at the centre of a high-profile case of academic misconduct involving now-former academic researcher Jonathan Pruitt. Alleged to have falsified data in his research across multiple journals and studies, there have been 14 retractions of studies that Dr. Pruitt has been involved in, with 11 expressions of concern and four corrections. Dr. Pruitt has since quietly resigned from his post at the university and returned to the United States to teach high school.

Academic misconduct – which can be plagiarizing, falsifying data, or even theft – isn’t a problem unique to McMaster, or even Canada for that matter. In addition to the controversy and alarm that cases like Dr. Pruitt’s cause, it is not always clear what the next steps should be after the misconduct comes to light. So how are universities navigating these issues when they arise, and do the policies they have in place actually work? Often, high profile cases like Dr. Pruitt’s that catch the media’s attention tend to be addressed as one-offs, says Sarah Elaine Eaton, who researches academic integrity at the University of Calgary as an associate professor at the Werklund School of Education. That reinforces the notion that misconduct is something that happens as a problem with one researcher or institution, rather than being a systemic issue. “That way, fingers can be pointed and blame can be laid, and everybody’s like, ‘Oh, not in my backyard. This is something happening at another university, not ours,’” Dr. Eaton says.

Dr. Eaton describes a cycle where these cases become known to the public, and universities do their best to manage the controversy’s effect on their reputations, but once that controversy dies down, everyone moves on. However, her observations of media reporting tell her that incidents of academic misconduct are on the rise, as she and co-editor Julia Christensen Hughes of Yorkville University outline in their recently published open access book, Academic Integrity in Canada: An Enduring and Essential Challenge. “In the research that I’ve done, we found that often journalists act as an early alert system for things like academic misconduct trends,” she says. “And if it’s investigative journalism on one incident or a couple of incidents, that may signal a larger problem.”