ABSTRACT A grounded‐theory study reveals how structural pressures and proximate incentives produce research misconduct among early‐career faculty in Iranian universities. Using 54 semi‐structured interviews (36 doctoral candidates, 10 early‐career faculty, 8 senior professors) and coded official news reports, we used open, axial and selective coding to build a processual model. Distal factors—political pressure, underfunding, unequal infrastructure, regional disparities—interact with proximal drivers: publication‐quantity incentives, intense competition, normalized cheating and academic exploitation. Emergent mechanisms (manuscript‐writing markets, unregulated AI) amplify fabrication, plagiarism and honorary authorship. Harms span individual (psychological strain), organizational (credibility loss, entrenched corruption) and national (erosion of R larger, geographically and disciplinarily diverse mixed‐methods studies are recommended.
Zeinab Mostafavi (Mon,) studied this question.