China and India are countries with highly trained good scientists, who work in a bad system. They have to make results constantly to keep officials happy. So there is a lot of research fraud. I don't know about Iran but it's probably similar. A lot depends on the field and institution but it's possible. (The West is really bad for research fraud too, but not as bad.)

This meta analysis tries to look for high "risk of bias" based on methodology. But it doesn't look like they consider the possibility of fraud, only bad methodology and statistics.