Shaping research integrity: Perceptions of mentorship and questionable research practices among undergraduate dental students and mentors in Karachi, Pakistan

Background: Questionable research practices (QRPs) undermine research integrity and may become normalized early during academic training. In undergraduate dental research, students' ethical conduct is shaped not only by formal instruction but also by mentorship, supervision, hierarchy, and institutional culture. However, limited qualitative evidence is available from Pakistan on how undergraduate dental students and mentors perceive ethical challenges and the role of mentorship in navigating QRPs. Methods: An exploratory descriptive qualitative study was conducted in two dental teaching institutions in Karachi, Pakistan: one public-sector and one private-sector institution. In-depth interviews were conducted with undergraduate dental students and faculty mentors involved in undergraduate research supervision. Participants were purposively selected to capture variation by participant role, institution type, gender, year of study, and supervisory experience. Separate semi-structured interview guides were developed for students and mentors, pilot-tested, and refined before data collection. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis, informed by Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. Reporting was guided by the COREQ and SRQR principles. Results: Four themes were developed: ethical awareness with limited procedural confidence; QRPs as normalized research shortcuts; mentorship as ethical scaffolding and a source of silence; and institutional systems as conditions that enable or constrain research integrity. Participants described basic awareness of ethical principles such as informed consent, confidentiality, plagiarism avoidance, and ethics approval. However, they also described difficulty applying these principles to authorship decisions, field procedures, data interpretation, and institutional review processes. Improper authorship, selective reporting, interpretive distortion, and procedural shortcuts were commonly discussed as QRPs. Mentorship was perceived as supportive when mentors were accessible, explicit, and ethically engaged, but hierarchical relationships and inconsistent supervisory engagement sometimes discouraged students from questioning questionable practices. Institutional barriers included limited practical ethics training, weak procedural support, productivity pressure, and a lack of safe reporting pathways. Conclusion: This study does not establish a causal or statistical relationship between mentorship and QRPs. Rather, it shows how undergraduate dental students and mentors perceive research integrity as being shaped through everyday interactions among ethical awareness, mentor–mentee dynamics, hierarchy, and institutional culture. The findings suggest that structured ethics teaching, clearer authorship guidance, reflective mentorship, and safe reporting mechanisms may strengthen undergraduate dental research integrity, although these interventions require further evaluation.