To find out just how easy it is to buy authorship of a research paper, ERR conducted a journalistic experiment and contacted a handful of paper mills. ERR collected contact details for seven of the most active sellers in the groups and messaged them directly on WhatsApp, as instructed in the ads. Of the seven contacts, most of whom had Indian names, five responded within the next half-hour.

The offers varied widely. The most expensive paper cost $800 and would have been published in a journal titled the Journal of Intelligent Decision Making and Information Science. According to the seller, publication would have taken just 20 days. The cheapest offer, meanwhile, was just $200, for which the computer scientist was offered co-authorship of a paper in a fisheries journal.

Aside from a couple of stranger offers, the paper mills were fairly consistent in quality. At first glance, all the sample papers looked like genuine research papers and only closer examination revealed that some of the figures were illogical or the references arbitrary. Within a few hours, every conversation had reached the point where a single email would have been enough to send the paper off to journals under the fictitious researcher's name.

Source https://news.err.ee/1610129869/experiment-how-easy-is-it-to-buy-a-research-paper-on-the-black-market

Another high-profile case has interested scientists. Read now