Despite its flashy image and good reputation among the general public as well as among the majority of scholars and intellectuals, science - like any other field of human activity - suffers from serious shortcomings and defects related to moral, ethical, professional and legal aspects and perspectives, where the generally approved standards, rules and values are - deliberately or non-deliberately, with or without good intention - infringed and violated by the individuals and institutions who produce, curate and promote science (i.e. academics, researchers, universities, scholarly journals, funding bodies, and so on). In this series of "The Dark Sides of Modern Science" we try to shed light on some of these negative aspects and downsides of modern science where we provide curated lists of references, in the form of scholarly journal articles and online sources, related to the topics of this subject. This compilation aims to raise awareness of this important issue among the general public as well as among scholars and specialists. Additionally, the series serves as a valuable starting point for researchers and writers who wish to explore the topics of this subject further and in greater detail. In this paper (which is the first in this series) we investigate the dark sides of knowledge production and authoring. Our intention is to investigate in the following papers of this series other dark sides of modern science related, for instance, to publishing, credit attribution and morality.