Background Research misconduct is a global concern in almost every scientific field. There is no comprehensive data regarding the prevalence of research misconduct among Iran's medical faculties. This study aims to conduct a nationwide survey regarding research misconduct in the faculty members of medical universities in Iran. Methods We used the Persian version of the research misconduct questionnaire (PRMQ) in an online survey on the Google Forms platform. Using Google Froms, the survey link was sent to a systematic random sample of medical faculty members in Iran (N = 4986). Descriptive analyses were performed on the individual items of PRMQ, with frequencies and percentages for categorical and Likert-type response items and means and standard deviation (S.D.) for continuous variables. Chi-square analysis was conducted to test hypotheses examining differences in frequency of responses related to factors influencing misconduct. All the analyses were performed using R 3.6.0. Results The response rate was 13.8% (692 responses). Nearly three-quarters (N = 499, 72.1%) of the respondents had first-hand witted some instances of research misconduct during the previous year. Academic scholars in various tenure categories rated investigator competitiveness differently (df:9, p = 0.008), with the highest difference in the mean scores between tenure categories one (TC1) (2.7, SD:0.87) and four (2.4, SD:0.77). Only 18.5% of participants perceived the effectiveness of their associated organization’s rules for reducing research misconduct to be high or very high. Pressure for tenure was identified as the most perceived as having a strong behavioral influence on engaging in research misconduct (80.2%). Conclusions Research misconduct is a living trouble among medical faculty members in Iran and needs a more proactive approach to tackle.

Background: To investigate gender differences in scientometric indices among faculty members in dental schools across Iran. This included overall data and speciality-specific data.Methods: The publication profiles of academic staff in all dental schools were examined using the Iranian Scientometric Information Database (ISID, http://isid.research.ac.ir). Variables analysed were working field, academic degree, total number of papers, papers per year, total number of citations, percentage of self-citation, h-index, g-index, citations per paper, gender, university type, number of years publishing, proportion of international papers, first-author papers, and corresponding-author papers. Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis nonparametric tests were used to analyse the relationship between background characteristics and scientometric indicators. The extracted data were analysed using R v4.0.1.Results: The database included 1850 faculty members, of which about 60% (1104 of 1850) were women. Men (n=746) had a higher number of papers (6583 vs 6255) and citations (60410 vs 39559) compared with women; 234 of the 376 faculty members with no papers were women. Almost half of the women (N=517 of 1104) were in Type 2 universities, and nearly half of the men (N=361 of the 746) were faculty members at Type 1 universities (Type 1 universities ranking higher than Type 2 and 3 universities). The medians of scientometric indices were higher in men, except for self-citation percentage (0 (IQR=2) vs 0 (IQR=3), P=0.083), international papers percentage (0 (IQR=7.5) vs 0 (IQR=16.7), P<0.001). The proportion of corresponding-author papers was more than 62% higher in women (25 (IQR=50) vs 15.4 (IQR=40), P<0.001). Men had a two-fold higher median h-index (2 (IQR=4) vs 1 (IQR=3), P<0.001). Restorative dentistry and paediatric dentistry had the highest men-to-women ratios (1.5 for both). Dental materials and oral and maxillofacial surgery showed the lowest men-to-women ratios (0.42 and 0.5, respectively).Conclusions: Women made up the majority of dental faculty members in Iran. Nevertheless, men showed better scientometric results in several significant indices. Having identified scientometric information reflecting difference across faculty members, further research is now needed to better understand the drivers of these differences.