President Obama's administration is set to be rocked by scandal - at least, according to one political scientist's mathematical formula.

A newly-released report by scholar Brendan Nyhan predicts the reputation of the 44th US president will soon be marred by controversy.

Where Are the Obama Scandals? calls the odds of scandal 'high and rising' after two years in office, based on his interpretation of data from presidential scandals between 1977 and 2008.

Nyhan, a scholar at the University of Michigan, released the report to website Center for Politics on Thursday.

Serving as a guest columnist, he presented detailed graphs illustrating the likelihood of a scandal to unfold before the 2012 presidential election - rising between 95 and 100 per cent by June of next year.

The report reads: 'Obama has been extremely fortunate: My research on presidential scandals shows that few presidents avoid scandal for as long as he has.'

He tested his hypotheses on scandal coverage data from Washington Post news reports and chronologies of presidential events covered by the New York Times.

'In the 1977-2008 period,' he wrote, 'the longest that a president has gone without having a scandal featured in a front-page Washington Post article is 34 months - the period between when President Bush took office in January 2001 and the Valerie Plame scandal in October 2003.'

Nyhan claims his research is supported by the lack of support among Republicans for the Obama administration, and predicts he will follow 'a similar trajectory to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton (who both suffered significant first-term scandals).'

(Read by Renee Haines. Renee Haines is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)