Dr. Anna Abalkina is a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Perugia (Italy) with a background in international economics. However, she later shifted her research focus to corruption in higher education, academic misconduct, plagiarism, paper mills, and predatory and hijacked journals. Her research not only involves detecting and analyzing scientific misconduct but also explaining its costs and consequences.

Since 2013, Anna Abalkina has been actively serving as an expert for Dissernet, a grassroots initiative aimed at detecting plagiarism in Ph.D. theses and scientific papers in the Russian language. Since 2021, she has successfully detected and investigated several paper mills, identifying nearly 2,000 papers with potential authorship fraud and/or violations of peer review. In 2022, Anna Abalkina in collaboration with Retraction Watch created "The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker," a regularly updated list of hijacked journals.