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The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the journals of the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) (Web of Science platform) in respect to publication misconduct and predatory practices.

The paper employs formal criteria developed by the Disseropedia of Russian Journals (a.k.a. the Journal Project of the Russian Dissernet).

A substantial number of the RSCI journals violate publishing ethics and/or are involved in predatory practices (fake peer-review, plagiarism and self-plagiarism, publication of pseudoscientific papers and so on). The general trend is negative: the number of such journals was higher in July 2018 than in 2015 when the RSCI was launched. The authors propose that this situation is due to the non-transparent and partly defective process of journal selection involved; primarily it can be attributed to problems with the RSCI expert pool.

Many cases of publication misconduct are inevitably overlooked due to natural limitations of the tools.

The approach and methods were developed by the Disseropedia of Russian Journals and the Dissernet for the specific local Russian situation, where the scientific and editorial community is corrupt and the institution of reputation does not work properly. The authors believe that the experience may also be helpful for scientists and academic officials from other countries.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the journey of academic professors who have engaged in ghostwriting.

This study adopts qualitative exploratory methods to investigate the ghostwriters' journey into academic ghostwriting. To achieve the goal, the authors interviewed academic ghostwriters, who were working for a diploma mill company, specifically focused on PhD thesis writing in the NIS setting.

This study revealed several interesting insights from ghostwriter perspective such as the origins and motivation of ghostwriters, ghostwriters life, ghostwriters' careers and impediments faced by them.

Given the dispersed and sensitive nature of the topic, this is one of the few studies to investigate ghostwriting and offer implications.

This chapter reviews the challenges facing educational research and knowledge production, in the independent post-Soviet Central Asia through examination of the case of Tajikistan. The chapter revisits issues discussed in Niyozov and Bahry (2006) on the need for research-based approaches to with these challenges, taking up Tlostanova’s (2015) challenge to see Central Asian educational history as repeated intellectual colonization, decolonization, and recolonization leading her to question whether Central Asians can think, or must simply accept policies and practices that travel from elsewhere. The authors respond by reviewing Tajikistan as representative in many aspects, if not all particulars, of the entire region. Part one of the review describes data sources, analyses, and our positionalities. Part two reviews decolonization in comparative, international, and development education and in post-Soviet education. Part three describes education research and knowledge production types and their key features. Thereafter, the authors discuss additional challenges facing Tajikistan’s and the region’s knowledge production and link them to the possibilities of decolonization discourse. The authors conclude by suggesting realistic steps the country’s scholars and their comparative international education colleagues may take to move toward developing both research capacity and decolonization of knowledge pursuits in Tajikistan and Central Asia.