A plagiarism epidemic is sweeping across Iran's universities according to a damning new report.

Research released by Iran’s parliament claims that as many as half of the postgraduate theses produced between 2019 and 2022 have been fraudulently written.

Etemad daily presented the details of the report on Monday, saying that a total of 72,0057 doctoral dissertations were submitted during the mentioned years, out of which 21,264 (29%) had more than 30% similarities with other scientific texts.

In the same period, 675,713 master's theses were uploaded, out of them 311,648 (46%) were copied with more than 30 percent similarity.

Previously, in January 2016, it was reported that the Dutch Elsevier publishing house removed 26 papers by Iranian authors who were affiliated with Azad University due to fraud in the referencing of the outsourced journals.

Even though various experts in Iran have repeatedly emphasized the need to raise the quality of scientific production in Iran instead of mass production of articles and dissertations, Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, has always boasted of the high number of productions of scientific papers in Iran, calling it a sign of power.

Last week, the results of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) test showed that Iranian students are among the weakest in the world in terms of educational abilities.