One thing that stood out was that image duplication was more likely to take place in some countries rather than others: India and China were overrepresented in the number of papers with duplicated images, while the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and Australia were underrepresented. The authors proposed that these differences were cultural: the looser rules and softer punishments for scientific misconduct in countries like India and China might be responsible for their producing a higher quantity of potentially fraudulent research.
