The New York Times says Professor Hwang Woo-suk’s cloning scandal is just one sign of a global explosion in research that is outstripping the mechanisms meant to guard against error and fraud.

In a report entitled “Global Trend: More Science, More Fraud,” the U.S. daily on Tuesday quoted experts as saying that the problem is only getting worse, even as the number of research projects, and the journals that publish the findings, soar.

The report cited a drastic rise of more than 54-thousand scientific journals around the world as straining quality-control safeguards and encouraging fraud.

According to the paper, a survey of some three-thousand-400 scientists by the University of Minnesota and the HealthPartners Research Foundation last June reported that up to a third of the respondents had engaged in ethically questionable practices, from ignoring contradictory facts to falsifying data.