White Paper January 2025
Historic Trends in Academic Misconduct
Two decades of disciplinary data from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom.
This is relevant to you because:
- You need a quantitative baseline for misconduct before arguing for policy change or investment.
- You want comparable disciplinary case data across Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom.
- You assumed misconduct would fall back to pre-pandemic levels and want to check the numbers.
- You expect generative AI to have displaced traditional plagiarism, and want to see the data.
Abstract
This paper builds a quantitative baseline for plagiarism, the most common form of academic misconduct, by compiling disciplinary case data from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom. Reporting practice varies by country, so yearly disciplinary cases serve as a proxy where plagiarism figures are unavailable.
Swedish data, the most complete series, shows plagiarism accounting for roughly 60% of cases and misconduct rising sevenfold between 2007 and 2021. Every country examined saw a sharp increase during COVID-19, and none has returned to pre-pandemic levels. The paper identifies a long-term upward trend predating the pandemic, consistent patterns across borders, limited institutional transparency, and no sign in the data that generative AI has reduced conventional plagiarism.