Scientific Misconduct in Medical Education: A Bibliometric Analysis

Background: Scientific misconduct has various consequences, which must be addressed during the training of physicians, who will lead many fields of scientific research. Aim: To analyze the bibliometric characteristics of scientific output in Scopus regarding scientific misconduct in medical education. Methods: A bibliometric study was conducted in which a search strategy was developed to identify the articles indexed in the Scopus database from 2012 to 2021. Bibliometric parameters were estimated using the Scival tool. Results: The number of publications ranged from 2 to 6 was between 2012 and 2021. International collaboration increased to 33.3% in 2021. The Romanian Journal of Morphology and Embryology was the journal with the highest output on the topic; however, PLoS ONE had the greatest impact in terms of quartile (Q1) ranking and number of citations. The author with the highest impact was Nedjat Saharnaz from Iran. Two clusters of recurrence were found, highlighting the terms “medical student” and “plagiarism” in the first, and “scientific misconduct” in the second. Conclusion: Publications on scientific misconduct in medical training are scarce each year, with limited international collaboration. Lower-impact journals are the most frequently chosen for dissemination, despite having fewer citations and lower CiteScores in 2021.