essay paper mill

Essay mills explained: What they are and why you should avoid them

Essays and term papers can be stressful, especially for international students who sometimes doubt their ability to research in depth and write thousands of words in English, all to a tight deadline.  

That’s where essay mills come in, exploiting the fears of students and offering to do the hard work for them in exchange for money. 

But here’s the spoiler alert - you should absolutely avoid essay mills. All the time.

They don’t work for you. They don’t even work for the essay writers themselves, and you should see that as a big warning sign. But more on that below.

What are essay mills? 

Essay mills are pretty straightforward: You pay a company to write your essay for you. The company in turn offloads the essay to a (usually freelance) writer. A couple days or weeks later, and you get your completed essay in return. 

It’s not like a proofreading service, where someone can check your spelling, grammar and citations for a fee (though even those are controversial in universities). No, essay mills offer to write you an entire essay from scratch. 

In other words, they allow students to commit academic fraud. In fact, they exploit the worries and stresses of students and entice them into cheating. They’re considered deeply unethical, and put students themselves at risk of severe punishment if caught. 

Another business model of this kind are essay banks. Here, students can buy essays that have already been written. But there’s a much higher risk of getting caught for plagiarism, since who knows how many hundreds or thousands of people have used that very same essay. 

Are essay mills legal or illegal?

The legality of essay mills depends on where you go to university, but the unethicality is clear no matter the location. Here’s a quick rundown of essay mills’ legal status in popular study abroad countries:  

Anti - essay mill legislation in the UK was passed in the House of Commons in February 2021, and will soon be made law. It’s not totally illegal yet, but it’s just a matter of time. 

The Republic of Ireland has also passed a number of bills to help tackle essay mills, while the practice is totally illegal in Australia and New Zealand. 

As for the USA and Canada, some US states have made them illegal, while Canada is under mounting pressure to follow suit.  

But the content and nuances of these laws changes from place to place. For example, in some US states it’s illegal for the student to use them, whereas the bills in Ireland, the UK, New Zealand and Australia are an attempt to criminalise essay mill companies themselves.

However, when we talk about legality, we’re of course talking about the law. But just because you might not cause a criminal offense by using essay mills, it’s still academic fraud and/or plagiarism. And getting caught for that can come with some dire consequences. 

Long story short, you really shouldn’t use them, regardless of their legality. 

Why you should avoid essay mills

1. if it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.

The writer's pay is awful. I mean really bad. Trust me -- I write for a living, and I’ve seen hundreds of advertisements for essay mill jobs. Every time I see one I can’t believe how little money the writers make for so much time and effort.  

But does this affect you? Totally! Would you care about doing great work if, a) the money was terrible, and b) it wouldn’t take you anywhere in your career? I know I wouldn’t...

Let’s talk about cost and time to put this into some perspective. The price range of essay mills varies wildly depending on the writers they employ. You can pay anywhere between £10-£35 per page. Roll this out over a 10 page essay, and it could be anywhere between £100 and £350 for the final product. But you can also come across offers for much, much less money than this.

While that higher end of £350 might seem like a lot of money, trust me -- it’s really nothing for the amount of research, writing, citations, editing and proofreading required. 

If £100 per day is considered a “just fine but not great” sum of money in the UK, a writer would have to do all the work on your essay in 2.5 days just to make it worthwhile. And they’d have to do it without the subject knowledge that you have. 

2. The writers aren’t subject experts

Think about it: if they were a subject expert, would they really be working for a shady company that facilitates cheating? Not a chance. 

The main point is that these writers are badly underpaid and they’re not experts, therefore they’re putting very little effort or expertise into your essay. They just want to do it as quickly as possible before moving onto the next one. 

3. There’s no guarantee of a good grade

None. Since the writers are underpaid, lack expertise and rush their work, it’s a recipe for a bad final product. Multiple studies have shown that essay mills do mediocre work at best. 

The essay you pay hundreds of pounds for might get you a pass grade, but you could do much better yourself. 

4. The punishment is harsh

Every university has severe laws on plagiarism and academic fraud, which is the exact result of using an essay mill. At its most lenient, a student caught breaking rules on plagiarism will receive no grade at all for the work, but at worst they can be suspended or even expelled from your university.  

But the perfect “crime” goes unnoticed, right? Well, it’s unlikely in this case. 

5. Essay mills and detection services

Most universities use pretty innovative plagiarism detection software these days, which can pick up on any hint of fraudulent work. Thus, the risk of getting caught is very high. And by the time a student does get caught, they’ve already lost their hard earned cash to the essay mill company. 

6. Essay mills don’t care about you

The company doesn’t care about you, and nor does the writer. That’s a pretty bad starting point for doing business! Once they’ve got their money and done their sub-standard work, they can move on to exploiting someone else’s fears. 

7. There’s a risk of scams 

Most essay mill sites demand a deposit of the final amount, or sometimes the entire fee up front. Either way, you won’t see your essay until you’ve paid them something. This makes it a prime opportunity for scam artists to take your money without giving anything in return. 

You see, it’s extremely easy for scam artists to launch a website advertising essays for sale, then just shut the operation down once they’ve made some quick cash without doing any work. 

Speaking of scams, here’s an article on some other international student scams to watch out for !

8. There’s a risk of bribery too

And then there’s the risk of bribery. Even if a student thinks they’re anonymous while dealing with essay mills, they’re not. There’s an email address, bank account name, even their IP address to worry about. 

So if the company or the writer decides that they want to blackmail or bribe a student by threatening to unveil the truth, they can. And they’ll always be able to.  

A final word on essay mills: Honest work is the best work

It sounds old fashioned, but there’s no replacement for smart, hard, honest work. Any student can write a great term paper or essay assignment on their own. All it takes is time, research, and some focus. 

Even if you’re under pressure or lack some confidence in your English ability, there are so many better ways to deal with it. Use a study abroad education counsellor , speak to your teachers and your friends. They’ll be able to point you in the right direction and help make that essay easier. 

As for essay mills? Forget about them. They’re exploitative, they serve no good purpose, and you can do a better job yourself!

So you’re thinking about studying abroad? Great! Check out the range of amazing courses available through Edvoy. Click here to get started or click the button below!

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Fake academic papers are on the rise: why they’re a danger and how to stop them

Professor of Methodology and Integrity, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Disclosure statement

Lex Bouter is the founding chair of the World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation and co-chair of the 8th WCRI in Athens, 2-5 June 2024.

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In the 1800s, British colonists in India set about trying to reduce the cobra population, which was making life and trade very difficult in Delhi. They began to pay a bounty for dead cobras. The strategy very quickly resulted in the widespread breeding of cobras for cash .

This danger of unintended consequences is sometimes referred to as the “ cobra effect ”. It can also be well summed up by Goodhardt’s Law , named after British economist Charles Goodhart. He stated that, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The cobra effect has taken root in the world of research. The “publish or perish” culture, which values publications and citations above all, has resulted in its own myriad of “cobra breeding programmes”. That includes the widespread practice of questionable research practices, like playing up the impact of research findings to make work more attractive to publishers.

It’s also led to the rise of paper mills, criminal organisations that sell academic authorship. A report on the subject describes paper mills as (the)

process by which manufactured manuscripts are submitted to a journal for a fee on behalf of researchers with the purpose of providing an easy publication for them, or to offer authorship for sale.

These fake papers have serious consequences for research and its impact on society. Not all fake papers are retracted. And even those that are often still make their way into systematic literature reviews which are, in turn, used to draw up policy guidelines, clinical guidelines, and funding agendas.

How paper mills work

Paper mills rely on the desperation of researchers — often young, often overworked, often on the peripheries of academia struggling to overcome the high obstacles to entry — to fuel their business model.

They are frighteningly successful. The website of one such company based in Latvia advertises the publication of more than 12,650 articles since its launch in 2012. In an analysis of just two journals jointly conducted by the Committee on Publications Ethics and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, more than half of the 3440 article submissions over a two-year period were found to be fake.

It is estimated that all journals, irrespective of discipline, experience a steeply rising number of fake paper submissions. Currently the rate is about 2%. That may sound small. But, given the large and growing amount of scholarly publications it means that a lot of fake papers are published. Each of these can seriously damage patients, society or nature when applied in practice.

The fight against fake papers

Many individuals and organisations are fighting back against paper mills.

The scientific community is lucky enough to have several “fake paper detectives” who volunteer their time to root out fake papers from the literature. Elizabeth Bik , for instance, is a Dutch microbiologist turned science integrity consultant. She dedicates much of her time to searching the biomedical literature for manipulated photographic images or plagiarised text. There are others doing this work , too.

Organisations such as PubPeer and Retraction Watch also play vital roles in flagging fake papers and pressuring publishers to retract them.

These and other initiatives, like the STM Integrity Hub and United2Act , in which publishers collaborate with other stakeholders, are trying to make a difference.

But this is a deeply ingrained problem. The use of generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT will help the detectives – but will also likely result in more fake papers which are now more easy to produce and more difficult or even impossible to detect.

Stop paying for dead cobras

They key to changing this culture is a switch in researcher assessment.

Researchers must be acknowledged and rewarded for responsible research practices: a focus on transparency and accountability, high quality teaching, good supervision, and excellent peer review. This will extend the scope of activities that yield “career points” and shift the emphasis of assessment from quantity to quality.

Fortunately, several initiatives and strategies already exist to focus on a balanced set of performance indicators that matter. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment , established in 2012, calls on the research community to recognise and reward various research outputs, beyond just publication. The Hong Kong Principles , formulated and endorsed at the 6th World Conference in Research Integrity in 2019, encourage research evaluations that incentivise responsible research practices while minimise perverse incentives that drive practices like purchasing authorship or falsifying data.

These issues, as well as others related to protecting the integrity of research and building trust in it, will also be discussed during the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity in Athens, Greece in June this year.

Practices under the umbrella of “ Open Science ” will be pivotal to making the research process more transparent and researchers more accountable. Open Science is the umbrella term for a movement consisting of initiatives to make scholarly research more transparent and equitable, ranging from open access publication to citizen science.

Open Methods, for example, involves the pre-registration of a study design’s essential features before its start. A registered report containing the introduction and methods section is submitted to a journal before data collection starts. It is subsequently accepted or rejected based on the relevance of the research, as well as the methodology’s strength.

The added benefit of a registered report is that reviewer feedback on the methodology can still change the study methods, as the data collection hasn’t started. Research can then begin without pressure to achieve positive results, removing the incentive to tweak or falsify data.

Peer review

Peer reviewers are an important line of defence against the publication of fatally flawed or fake papers. In this system, quality assurance of a paper is done on a completely voluntary and often anonymous basis by an expert in the relevant field or subject.

However, the person doing the review work receives no credit or reward. It’s crucial that this sort of “invisible” work in academia be recognised, celebrated and included among the criteria for promotion. This can contribute substantially to detecting questionable research practices (or worse) before publication.

It will incentivise good peer review, so fewer suspect articles pass through the process, and it will also open more paths to success in academia – thus breaking up the toxic publish-or-perish culture.

This article is based on a presentation given by the lead author at Stellenbosch University, South Africa on 12 February 2024. Natalie Simon, a communications consultant specialising in research who is part of the communications team for the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity and is also currently completing an MPhil in Science and Technology Studies at Stellenbosch University, co-authored this article.

• Academic journals
• Research integrity
• Academic research
• Publish or perish
• Fake journals
• Paper mills
• Open Science movement

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• Writing Tips

Essay Mills and Why to Avoid Them

2-minute read

• 6th July 2018

Struggling with deadlines? College life feeling stressful ? You might be tempted to take a shortcut, especially if someone points you toward an essay mill. But what are essay mills exactly?

To help out, we’re here to explain what they are and why you should NEVER use them.

Essay Mills and Essay Banks

Some online businesses offer essays to students at a price. These come in two main types:

• Essay mills provide custom essays based on a specified topic, word count and deadline
• Essay banks sell pre-written essays, which are cheaper but less tailored

These businesses sometimes say that the essays they sell are just “templates” that students can use to generate ideas. However, using an essay mill is widely seen as cheating .

The Problem

Maybe you’ve read the descriptions above. But maybe you still think it sounds like an easy way to get a paper done without all the hard work of researching and writing it. Think again.

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If you use a paper from an essay mill or essay bank, you will regret it for several reasons:

• Using someone else’s words without citing them clearly is plagiarism
• If you are caught submitting a paper from an essay mill, it will count as academic fraud
• Colleges have software, such as Turnitin, designed to spot plagiarism
• Papers from essay mills can cost hundreds of dollars and there is no guarantee of quality

As a result, using an essay mill could leave you poorer and get you kicked off your course!

Essay Mills vs. Proofreading

But what if you still need help on a paper? If essay mills are a bad idea, what is your alternative? Well, the good news is that we can help! Having your work proofread has many advantages. We can:

• Correct your spelling, grammar, and punctuation
• Make sure your vocabulary is academic and that terminology is consistent
• Check that all of your sources are referenced correctly
• Tighten up your writing to make sure it is clear and concise

And all of this without making any major changes that could count as plagiarism. You will, of course, have to do the research and writing yourself. But that is how you learn things in the first place! The key is that we’re here to support you.

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Raising awareness of essay mills: How essay mills frame themselves as “help"

Contract cheating awareness

Turnitin is using advanced forensic linguistics and probability algorithms built on years of research to identify when work is likely not written by the student. So how does it work?

By completing this form, you agree to Turnitin's Privacy Policy . Turnitin uses the information you provide to contact you with relevant information. You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time.

As students, instructors, and administrators continue to increase their awareness of trends in academic misconduct, so, too, are essay mills upping the ante when it comes to extending their reach. Using predatory tactics that target stressed, struggling students, essay mills are finding a way to appeal to students in their moment of need.

It is important to understand how it is they are marketing themselves to students so that educators can mitigate their reach. It is also essential that educators support students on their learning journey and help them to feel seen, so that they are less vulnerable to these marketing strategies.

Here are some ways essay mills have framed themselves as “help” in educational settings around the world.

They advertise themselves as writing support. Under the guise of “writing help,” essay mills pretend that they are supporting struggling students. These companies are attempting to call themselves “writing assistance services” that are “trustworthy provider[s]” of material students can use to improve their own writing. Some claim to provide “thousands and thousands of free papers” which students can use “as the foundation of [their] own piece.”

A student in need may be drawn in by the supportive, empathetic tone of the article, feeling understood by these companies who are offering to help improve their writing. But this reassuring tone is, in fact, misleading: What is not mentioned is that these materials are actually ghostwritten essays that students use to represent their own work. The use of essay mills is a form of misconduct ; therefore, these services ultimately subvert authentic learning and do not, in the end, help writers seeking support.

What struggling students need in these situations are legitimate resources, supported by empathetic instructors that truly see them, identify their potential, and employ feedback loops to guide them in improving their own writing. Students and instructors alike should be wary of any essay mills parading as writing models or help in this manner.

They make themselves available where students congregate online. In addition to posting on social media–where stressed students may scroll at the eleventh hour without the presence of an educator–many essay mills are paying for advertisement spots on a variety of channels , sustaining the façade that they provide legitimate services. In fact, research suggests that contract cheating businesses employ automation tools on social media channels , like Twitter, to generate leads specific to their subject area.

This paid advertisement from an American online syndication highlights several companies that offer “expertly crafted free essay samples” to download as “models worth following or emulating.” Another online sponsored ad boasts reviewing the “TOP-3 Professional Academic Writing Services to Help You Through College” and strategically uses positive language in order to normalize the use of essay mills as a tenable writing resource, stating:

“Practical uses of this unique website include spotting new topics and content presentation ideas, creating an outline for your paper based on proper samples, and discovering new sources for your work in relevant samples. Kudos to the company for building a resource where students can find the best writing examples to learn from without violating any point in the academic integrity code.”

By advertising online in local and regional sites, these essay mills position themselves as a reputable writing resource, reaching students outside of the classroom.

They advertise themselves as an academic partner for research professionals. The cliché “Publish or perish” within academia still holds true for many around the world. When it comes to individuals seeking a promotion, increasing an institution’ s reputation, or in some extreme cases, merely keeping a position, the pressure to publish is often so great, support may be sought outside the norm.

Dr. Anna Abalkina , who focuses on academic fraud at the Free University of Berlin, has observed an increase in essay mill usage at the publishing level, saying she “believed the trade in ghostwritten journal papers was growing rapidly as scholars seeking publication by nefarious means turned away from low-quality predatory journals and towards businesses that guaranteed them publication in recognised outlets.”

Instead of merely writing a paper for a high price, these ghostwriting companies offer a “co-authorship” opportunity for those in need of a byline in a published journal. “Many scholars [are] turning to businesses such as International Publisher LLC, which offers the opportunity to become a co-author of a manuscript that is already accepted for publication by a journal.”

The papers for sale are known to utilize plagiarized materials from foreign-language PhD theses or from trade journals, then translated into English, costing upwards of €5,000 ($5,718) for a first authorship in a reputable journal. Individuals who do not grasp the true cost of contract cheating to academic integrity , may feel the pressure to seize this “opportunity” to publish. Instead of helping to facilitate innovation and share new ideas, these mills flagrantly take advantage of customers in their time of need and perpetuate a cycle of academic dishonesty. The consequences are vast and the impact of this misconduct is immeasurable: to the academic, this may result in censure by the community; to the institution, a scandal may incur; and the dissemination of such papers can endanger accurate information and overall research integrity.

They advertise themselves as “plagiarism-free.” This post reached out to a Spanish-speaking demographic, trumpeting the value of what they dubbed “‘la opción gratuita y en español de Turnitin creada por Ayuda Universitaria’ [the free Spanish Turnitin option created by University Help].”

Right away, the article makes an effort to place the business on the right side of integrity. It emphasizes “[l]a importancia de los software antiplagio [the importance of anti-plagiarism software]” and explains that it is, indeed, a crime to appropriate the intellectual property of another. It claims to offer a completely free Spanish option for ensuring originality, detailing how Ayuda Universitaria scans the internet for matches in order to detect plagiarism.

However, upon visiting the mentioned website directly, it is immediately clear that there is more available than just “plagiarism checking.” One can select what type of project is needed, the cost of that project, read reviews/ratings, and then purchase a paper for a specific degree. By utilizing key search words within the article itself (“plagiarism software” and “Turnitin”), this company not only strategically lures potential customers to their website, but also works hard to position themselves as an affordable integrity solution. And while essay mill papers are technically free of plagiarism–bespoke pieces of content written for a specific assignment or degree–students who aren’t aware that papers written by a third party are still an egregious form of misconduct may fall prey to this tactic.

Whether it’s framing themselves as “help” or simply misrepresenting their offerings in order to appeal to students and academic professionals in need, make no mistake that these essay mills are still a business. They charge a fee and sell opportunities for misconduct ; that is, when an individual involves a third party to complete an assignment, which they then represent as their own work. Especially in remote learning , it is essential for students, instructors, and administrators alike to understand the impact of these essay mills on academic integrity and differentiate between disreputable claims and legitimate resources to support writing.

Bottom line: essay mills endanger original thinking and original ideas and erode the integrity of institutions.

Essay mills are a growing market, with over 1,000 listed in the United Kingdom alone. Join members of the QAA Academic Integrity Advisory Group on the 12th of April as they discuss the risks associated with using contract cheating services.

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it. Angela Hsieh/NPR hide caption

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

Felicity Huffman And 12 Other Parents To Plead Guilty In College Cheating Scandal

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

Essay mills: What are they, and why students should avoid them

Have you ever been stuck on what to write for your university entrance essay, or felt under pressure with the numerous deadlines looming and have no time to work on your thesis?  Maybe a friend has told you how they’ve used essay mills, or perhaps you’ve seen an ad yourself popping up on your screen while surfing the internet.

Essay mills, or “essay factories” , are businesses that offer a service to write an essay or term paper for students for a fee.

These are not your basic proofreading or editing services, but businesses where essays are written for you. They do extensive research, proofreading, citations, and deliver a final essay to the customer (i.e. you, the student), which you can credit as your own.

Essay mills are nothing new in this day and age, having started in the mid-1800s when students in fraternity houses shared term papers. Later in the 1950s, the lucrative business of ghostwriting evolved where writers wrote material on behalf of authors or celebrities. 

Specialised companies were set up near university campuses where students could walk in and purchase the services of a team of writers to do their essays for them. However, with the onset of technology and the internet, the essay mills business has mushroomed in recent years. 

Some students have opted to use essay mills to get their work done without the stress and pressure of researching and working on a paper themselves. These essay mills or essay factories are easily accessible and promoted via various social media and online platforms.

Gareth Crossman from Quality Assurance Association for Higher Education (QAA), an independent body that checks on standards and quality in UK higher education, told the BBC that one in seven college students  might be cheating  on their work. 

With essay mills, there’s a risk of bribery, while there’s no guarantee that the article purchased is of excellent quality. Source: Christina Quicler/AFP

International students whose English isn’t their first language may be tempted to use essay mills due to their lack of language skills or insecurities.

Despite that, they are highly unethical and can lead to students being found guilty of plagiarism and academic fraud. Nowadays, many universities and colleges use software such as Turnitin, which can easily spot any discrepancies or plagiarism in a student’s work. 

Some are even resorting to asking students to take oral examinations if it is suspected that they have not completed the work themselves. Ultimately, it’s best for students to avoid essay mills at all costs.

Students have an obligation to submit authentic work while at university, and understand how writing and researching for a paper is part and parcel of the learning journey. 

Taking the easy option of using essay mills services is for short gain only as students are essentially cheating and taking the credit for something that another person has worked on. To boot, there’s no guarantee that the article purchased is of excellent quality or free from plagiarism.

Suppose you are struggling with writing your term paper; why not consider taking some extra classes to improve your English language skills or talk to your university professor or counsellor for some valuable advice? 

There’s nothing quite like that feeling of pride and accomplishment of submitting work that you worked on yourself. After all, as the ancient Greek philosopher Sophocles once said, “Without labour, nothing prospers.”

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Industrialized Cheating in Academic Publishing: How to Fight “Paper Mills” 

A growing problem in research and publishing involves “paper mills”: organizations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that resemble legitimate research articles. This form of fraud affects the integrity of academic publishing, with repercussions for science as well as the general public. How can fake articles be detected? And how can paper mills be counteracted?  

In this episode of Under the Cortex , Dorothy Bishop talks with APS’s Ludmila Nunes about the metascience of fraud detection, industrial-scale fraud and why it is urgent to tackle the fake-article factories known as “paper mills.” Bishop, a professor of neurodevelopmental psychology at Oxford University, is also known for her breakthrough research on developmental disorders affecting language and communication. 

Unedited transcript:

[00:00:12.930] – Ludmila Nunes  

In research and publishing, “paper mills” are organizations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that resemble legitimate research articles. This form of fraud affects the integrity of academic publishing with repercussions for the science itself, but also for the general public. How can these fake articles be detected? And how can paper mills be counteracted? Today’s episode will explore these questions. This is under the cortex. I am Ludmila Nunes with the association for Psychological Science. Today I have with me Dorothy Bishop, professor of Neurodevelopmental Psychology at Oxford University. Dr. Bishop is known for her breakthrough research on developmental disorders affecting language and communication, which has helped to build and advance the developmental language impairment field. But Dr. Bishop’s interests go well beyond neurodevelopmental psychology, as her blog, Bishop Blog, illustrates. At the APS International Convention of Psychological Science, held last March in Brussels, dr. Bishop presented her work on the meta science of fraud detection, discussing industrial scale fraud and why it is urgent to tackle the so called paper mills, or fake articles factories. I invited Dr. Bishop to join us today and tell us more about the battle against industrialized cheating in academic publications. Dorothy, thank you for joining me today. 

[00:01:50.400] – Ludmila Nunes  

Welcome to Under the Cortex. 

[00:01:52.360] – Dorothy Bishop  

Thank you very much for inviting me, Ludmila, it’s lovely to be here. 

[00:01:56.870] – Ludmila Nunes  

So I was lucky enough to see your presentation at ICPS, and I thought this topic was fascinating because it’s a different type of fraud than what we usually talk about in psychology. We talked a lot about replication crisis. Some researchers faking their data, but this is different. Do you want to explain us what paper mills are? 

[00:02:23.950] – Dorothy Bishop  

Yes. As you said before, they’re this sort of industrial scale fraud. I think perhaps initially started out as helping people write papers for language reasons, but then sort of veered into actually creating fake papers that they would then sell to people that needed publications and then place them in journals. So you have these strange papers that really you can divide into two types. The first type is like the plausible paper mill paper, which is often made from a template of a genuine paper. So they’ve taken a genuine paper and then just tweaked it a bit so that it looks like a perfectly decent piece of work, but has had some changes. And then there’s another kind which seems to be very weird papers that anybody who reads them will think they’re extremely strange, and they possibly are computer generated, or in some cases, they seem to be plagiarized or possibly just based on very basic things like undergraduate essays. So they’re a bit of a mishmash, but they are things that would not normally pass peer review. And so the question that really started to interest me is, how did these things even get into the literature? 

[00:03:39.910] – Dorothy Bishop  

The first kind of paper mill paper, which looks plausible, you can imagine, would have just have fooled a regular editor. But this second kind that look very weird and don’t often make much sense and may have all sorts of bizarre features, suggests that we’ve got a situation in some journals where the editorial process has been compromised and where editors may even be complicit with the paper mill. 

[00:04:07.150] – Ludmila Nunes  

And to make it clear, we are talking about articles that can make their way into more prestigious peer reviewed journals. 

[00:04:14.840] – Dorothy Bishop  

Yes, I mean, again, there’s a very wide range and it’s an evolving scenario. I sometimes draw parallels with things like COVID because it’s a bit like being suddenly attacked by some virus that mutates. But what people have discovered is that there’s a lot of money in this. And of course, if you can place a paper in a prestigious journal, that’s more valuable. And indeed, if you go online, these tend to not be in English, but there are some of these adverts in English, but mostly in other languages where the papers are actively advertised. So they’ll say authorship for sale and the amount you pay will depend on the caliber of the journal and on your authorship position. So there’s always a pressure from the paper mills. They regard it as a great success if they can get a paper into a prestigious journal, or at least into a journal that’s featured in, say, Web of Science at Clarivate, which means it gets indexed so that your citations would count in an H index. And I should say that you might say, well, who would cite these if they’re really rubbish? But they also do look after the citations. 

[00:05:22.990] – Dorothy Bishop  

So what will happen if you get a paper mill paper in one of these journals? A whole load of citations will be added, often of very little relevance to the content of the paper, but it’s clearly to boost citations of other paper mill papers. So there’s this entire industry which is rather like a sort of parallel universe where they’re playing at doing science and the outputs have all the hallmarks of regular science, but the content is just rubbish. 

[00:05:51.810] – Ludmila Nunes  

And so what made you aware and interest in this topic? Was it a specific event or you just started seeing these articles and thinking this seems weird that these even got published? 

[00:06:05.970] – Dorothy Bishop  

Yes, I’m trying to think back actually to exactly how it happened. But I think I was already interested after I retired. I retired last year, this time last year, and I decided I wanted to look a bit more at fraud because I’d been focusing on the reproducibility crisis that you’d mentioned and on questionable research practices and how to improve science more generally. But like most people, I think I regarded fraud as relatively rare and much more difficult to prove and so on. And I think it was probably the person that a Russian woman who co authored a paper on this with me, Anna Abalkina, who I knew from a Slack channel where we exchanged information, and she mentioned that she was aware of a paper mill and that some of the papers in it were psychology papers. But she is an economist, and she didn’t really feel she could evaluate these. So I offered to look at them. And then we found a little nest of six of these papers in a perfectly reputable psychology journal, which really surprised me that they really raised questions about how did they get in there, because these were of the kind that they were probably based on original projects or something, but they were no way of a caliber that would get into a journal. 

[00:07:22.040] – Dorothy Bishop  

It was often quite hard to work out what they were actually about. They sort of meandered around and talked in great generalities, and you might say, well, how do you know it was not just the editor having an off day? Well, Anna’s strategy for identifying these paper mill papers and these six came from a much bigger paper mill, but it was that you could find papers where the email address of the authors was a fake email address. So the domain looked like an academic domain, but you can track it back, and it’s a domain that is available for purchase on the web. So you can buy these email domains, and then you can make loads and loads of email addresses. And typically, they were email domain addresses that didn’t match the country of the author. So you’d have somebody with a UK or Irish looking email address, but from Kazakhstan, for example. That can happen if somebody’s moved jobs. But it kept happening in all these papers, and then I looked at them, and they clearly didn’t look as if they should be published anywhere. But you could say, well, I’m just being difficult there. 

[00:08:31.910] – Dorothy Bishop  

But the real interesting point with these was that in most cases, they had open peer review. And so you could look at the peer review, and the peer review did not look like normal peer review. It was incredibly superficial. So it would say things like, the paragraphs are too long, break them up. Or it would say, the reference list needs refreshing. And the same terminology used across these six papers, very short referee reports asking for very superficial changes, not engaging at all with the content. And the peer reviewers who are in some cases listed were people if you tried to find them online, they didn’t seem to exist, or they had very shady presences. You couldn’t find that they’d ever published anything. So it looked as if the whole business of peer review had been compromised by using fake peer reviewers with fake email addresses and fake authors with these fake email addresses to get these publications accepted in the journal. 

[00:09:31.750] – Ludmila Nunes  

So you started by looking at this set of six articles, and then you went beyond that. 

[00:09:37.910] – Dorothy Bishop  

Well, Anna had already gone well beyond that, I have to say. She’s got a spreadsheet with I think now it’s gone to a couple of thousand papers, all with these same sorts of characteristics. And of course the difficulty is you do tend to have to go through carefully. You don’t want to accuse somebody who’s written a perfectly legitimate paper. So it’s quite painstaking work. She’s found, more recently another journal. This one was the Journal of Community Psychology. It’s a Wiley journal. There was another journal, I can’t remember the publisher, but another psychology journal that looked thoroughly reputable where another little cluster occurred. And of course, one of the things we wanted to do was to say, how did this happen? Because it does suggest that the editor was either asleep at the job or was involved in the paper mill. And it was hard to believe this because it looked again like a perfectly reputable editor. So the way we tried to test that was by actually submitting a paper to the Journal in which we described the paper mill to sort of like act as a sort of sting operation, in the sense that we thought if he was really just not reading the papers and delegating to somebody to just sort of go through the motions, it maybe he wouldn’t notice that our paper was highly critical of his journal. 

[00:10:49.460] – Dorothy Bishop  

In fact, he did notice and he just desk rejected our paper and said it was a very superficial paper, which is hilarious given what he did. So that to us did seem evidence that something was seriously wrong with the way he was treating papers. And we did complain and write to the integrity person in Wiley and eventually those papers were all retracted, I’m pleased to say. But yes, I also then around the same time did start looking at other journals. I mean, there are a number of people doing this and it’s painstaking work. You sort of could trawl through some of these journals. But there’s another way in which things are getting into less reputable journals, perhaps, although still journals that were listed in Clarabay and that’s via special issues. So some journals have realized that a good way to get a lot of submissions and if you’re charging people for submissions, this makes a lot of money, is to have a special issue. And so they advertised in the journal saying, would you like to edit a special issue? In fact, some of your listeners may have had emails from such journals saying, would you like to edit a special issue? 

[00:12:00.010] – Dorothy Bishop  

We’re very keen on this. And then it seems that they didn’t do sufficient quality control on the people who replied. And there were people in paper mills who clearly realized this was an amazing opportunity to get somebody in as an editor and then they can just accept whatever they like. And this was on a different scale to that previous case I mentioned. So there are a number of hindawi journals in particular, which is again a subgroup of Wiley, unfortunately, but they were really expanding the number of special issues massively. And they had articles in there that were even worse than the ones in the Journal of Community Psychology in the sense that they really made no sense. So I invented a term for some of them which was AI Gobbledygoop, because you would have a few paragraphs that made sort of sense but were just bit boring and not very you didn’t really know where it was going, but they were about something. In some cases, they were about something that had nothing to do with the journal, like Marxism in a Journal of Environmental Health. So you’d have your bit about Marxism, then you’d suddenly get in the middle a whole load of very, very technical artificial intelligence stuff, full of formulae and technical terms which didn’t relate to anything else very much as far as you could see, and then it would revert at the end to the more standard stuff. 

[00:13:22.910] – Dorothy Bishop  

And it was like a sandwich with this strange stuff in the middle that was you couldn’t necessarily with competence, say it was rubbish. But what you can often do is then track it to Wikipedia. It was often just lifted from Wikipedia. And these things were at scale. I mean, we’re talking about literally sometimes more than 100 such papers in a special issue with a particular editor. And so I started doing big analyses of those by really just combing the website of certain journals to see how many had these special issues with numerous papers who were the editors. And then looking at actually the response times between the submission to the journal. 

[00:14:05.810] – Ludmila Nunes  

I bet they were much faster than. 

[00:14:08.340] – Dorothy Bishop  

Usual, they tended to be very fast. And then I could tie that in with whether these papers had had comments on the website pub peer. Now, Pubier is a very useful post publication peer review website where anybody can put in a statement or comment on a paper. And of course there’s not huge quality control, although they do weed out completely crazy things or stuff that’s libel us. But basically a lot of people had started picking up on paper mills and making comments about things like the references bear no relationship to the paper, or the paper doesn’t bear any relationship to the topic of the journal, or picking up on duplication or plagiarized material and things like this. And so I could show that there were massive amounts of these Pub peer comments, particularly for the special issues, which had things accepted very, very fast. And it identified about 30 journals that were, I think, pretty problematic on the there’s no one indicator that something’s a paper mill, but when you get enough of these different indicators, you can start to be and particularly when it’s across a number of papers in the journal, you realize it’s a problem. 

[00:15:22.420] – Dorothy Bishop  

So rather to my surprise, I mean, I just had no idea how much of this stuff there was out there. But you could have a full time job investigating this because it’s getting worse, I think, and it’s going to get worse as artificial intelligence gets worse. And it’s easier to generate papers that are fake but that don’t look as crazy as some of the ones that I’ve been looking at. 

[00:15:43.940] – Ludmila Nunes  

That’s exactly what I was going to ask you, if you think that the amount of these fake papers is increasing and what role artificial intelligence might play in masking them better and making them harder to detect. 

[00:16:01.000] – Dorothy Bishop  

Yeah, I think it’s very frightening because we’ve just recently, I mean, there’s been such a lot of excitement just in the past couple of months about the new AI systems that are coming out that can generate people are worried about student essays and things. Anybody can cheat, and it’s very hard to pick it up. That’s going to apply as well to academic articles. And previously, some of the attempts to use AI have led to very unintentionally hilarious consequences because what they were trying to do, they were plagiarizing stuff and then running it through some AI that put it through a sort of thesaurus to change some of the words because they were trying to avoid plagiarism detectors. And that sometimes led to very strange turns of phrase, particularly in statistical things. So that instead of the sort of standard error of the mean, it would be the standard blunder of the mean. If you know of statistics, this is bad, it’s not what is called. And then breast cancer becomes bosom peril. And there’s a guy and team, in fact a guy running a little team of people in France who have been gathering examples of these and then doing the opposite. 

[00:17:06.830] – Dorothy Bishop  

They’re actually running articles, picking up these, what they call tortured phrases to identify paper mill products. And that’s a very good way at the moment of identifying them. But of course, I doubt it will have much longevity because the odds are that as soon as the paper mill people realize that you can do that, they’ll move it to something else and they’ll stop using and indeed, that they’ll probably no longer find it necessary to use that system. But I have to say it causes a lot of merriment in looking at some of the things that people put into papers when they don’t know what the words actually mean. 

[00:17:41.410] – Ludmila Nunes  

Okay, so we’ve been talking about this way of cheating and getting articles published, articles that aren’t real. But who is benefiting from these? 

[00:17:52.550] – Dorothy Bishop  

Very good question. Lots of people are benefiting, unfortunately. The sad reality is that there are a number of countries where you are required to have publications to progress in your career. And the earlier paper mills were from China, where in the medical profession, if you wanted to be a hospital doctor and you weren’t interested in doing research, you nevertheless had to have a publication to, I think, advance to be the next level consultant or whatever. And so, of course, the motivation for people to buy such a publication was really high and in fact, I think in some cultures people don’t regard it as doing anything wrong to do this. So there’s a sort of whole cultural thing that well, of course you do this because this is something you’re required to do and there’s no way you’re really going to generate a publication. The Chinese academic system, I think, is beginning to realize that they have a massive problem and they’re trying now to take measures to prevent this. But it’s been going on and a lot of these ones in the Hindawi journals that I mentioned do come from China and there are other countries too where there is this sort of system. 

[00:19:02.940] – Dorothy Bishop  

So unfortunately, Kazakhstan, Ukraine also to some extent, Iran. So they tend to be countries where the pressures on people who want to advance are extreme and the resources are perhaps not so good. And sometimes you can trace the paper mills, unfortunately, to people in senior positions who’ve found this is a good money making enterprise. So once you get corruption in the system, unfortunately it really can encourage this. Now, of course, the people that make huge sums of money are the people who are selling the papers and they are just straightforward crooks, but they are making huge amounts of money. If you’re producing these things and you’re charging people $1,000 per paper published in just one journal you’ve got perhaps 100 special issues each with 50 odd papers in. You can do the sums and start to realize that the income is huge. And then the publishers you see that there’s been a lot of criticism of the idea that the publishers may have been complicit because they’re making so much money from the article processing charges. But for them, the chickens have now come home to roost just recently in a very big way because Clarivate has delisted a whole load of Hindawi journals for exactly this. 

[00:20:24.090] – Dorothy Bishop  

So I think what they say is they’ve been using their own again, everybody’s using AI, but they’ve been using their own developed AI systems to try and spot paper mill products and have identified patterns that are clearly abnormal in some of these journals and realized that it’s doing a lot of harm to have them in the main scientific literature. And that’s very damaging to the publisher whose profits, in fact, visibly have sunk. People have been documenting how much they’ve lost. So ultimately, I think people say, oh, well, the publishers went into it for the money but I think they must know that it’s not in their interest to get a very bad reputation for publishing rubbish. I think the problem has been not so much that they’ve been doing it on purpose, but that they’ve taken their eye off the ball and they have really not paid sufficient attention to the importance of vetting editors. The editor has a role as a gatekeeper, which is very important. And I think editors have just been assumed that anybody can do it and you don’t really need much in the way of qualifications or background. And in fact you obviously do need people not only with some publications but with integrity and some sort of track record and you know, who are doing it for the right reasons. 

[00:21:40.850] – Dorothy Bishop  

And I’m afraid that you’ve got the impression that almost anybody would be accepted as an editor for a period during sort of 2021, 2022. 

[00:21:51.570] – Ludmila Nunes  

So this is a problem, of course, because it’s an ethical problem, but it’s also a scientific problem because having these articles around can impair the development of science. 

[00:22:05.040] – Dorothy Bishop  

Absolutely. 

[00:22:06.330] – Ludmila Nunes  

And I’m thinking, for example, undergrad students or very young students who are not so used to read scientific articles and are not used to scrutinize the articles can get the wrong idea and think that this research is actually good research. 

[00:22:26.590] – Dorothy Bishop  

Another thing to bear in mind is that we’re now in the world of big data and there’s an awful lot of research is now involving metaanalyses or in the biological sphere, massive sort of big data things where they are pulling in from the internet lots. I mean, it feels like cancer biology, which are plagued by paper mills. A lot of people’s research involves automating processes for trawling the literature to find studies that work on a particular gene or a particular compound of some sort and then just sort of putting them all in a big database of associations between genes and phenotypes. Now, if this stuff gets in there, you can imagine it plays havoc with the people who then want to use those databases for, say, drug development. So I don’t think there’s probably quite a parallel for that in psychology. But that’s the kind of worry that one has and even the really rubbishy ones. I mean, if you’re trying to do a metaanalysis and it throws up loads and loads of papers, you have to check each of those papers, you’re just wasting your time. Even if you come to the conclusion that it’s a rubbish paper, you can’t include it’s clogging up people’s attention span and clogging up the literature. 

[00:23:36.300] – Dorothy Bishop  

And as you say, some people may also not have the ability to tell that it’s rubbish. But even those of us that do, you still have to read it long enough to tell that it’s rubbish. 

[00:23:46.010] – Ludmila Nunes  

It’s still a waste of our time. And as you mentioned in many cases now if we are doing a meta analysis, we can just scrub the data and pull that from the articles. And if we are trusting that the sources are good sources, normal journals, these articles just make their way into a meta analysis. 

[00:24:04.270] – Dorothy Bishop  

For example, I mean, the other victims of this I would say, which is rather indirect, but you could argue that the victims are the honest people in the science. And I have had emails from clearly honest people from Iran, from China who are trying to report to me because I’ve somehow now identified as somebody who picks up on this stuff, colleagues who are doing this. And quite often, as I said before, these are quite senior people that might be doing this. And they’re desperate for it to be stopped because from their perspective, it’s awful because A, they can’t get on if they’ve got a boss who’s doing this and B, their entire country and all the research coming out of that country then gets denigrated as being flawed in this way. And it must be awful to be somebody who’s an honest scientist working in an environment where this stuff is happening at scale. 

[00:24:57.790] – Ludmila Nunes  

Exactly. We mentioned paper mills in China and of course we might start paying more attention to an article that comes from Chinese authors and trying to scrutinize, is this a real paper? Is this a fake paper? And that’s very unfair for the serious researchers, for people who are actually doing their job. But this issue also has repercussions for the general public and can contribute to the mistrust in science, which is already a problem. 

[00:25:30.650] – Dorothy Bishop  

Yeah. And I mean, some people then say, well, we shouldn’t talk about it because it will impair public trust in science. But I have the opposite view, which is that we should talk about it and show that we’re tackling it because we can’t expect people to trust us. If this sort of stuff is going on. We have to show that we can deal with it and that we take it seriously because unless we show that it really matters to us and we’re going to take it on, we don’t really deserve the trust of the public. 

[00:26:00.710] – Ludmila Nunes  

Exactly. I completely agree with you. I think hiding the problem is not going to help science and it’s not going to help the public to trust scientists at all. 

[00:26:11.350] – Dorothy Bishop  

But it’s a real problem that when the trust is eroded, because we’ve seen that very much with COVID that people do reach the point where they don’t know what to believe and they know there’s some misinformation out there and they know there’s some good information out there. If peer review is not, or supposed peer review is not a reliable signal anymore as to what is more trustworthy, then it’s very, very difficult because none of us can be experts in all these areas that are involved in judging whether things like a vaccine is effective or whether a disease is associated with symptoms. And we have to have some mechanism whereby we know that certain types of work are trustworthy. So it’s very, very important to keep this from polluting the journals and the sources that should be trustworthy. 

[00:26:57.830] – Ludmila Nunes  

So just to summarize to our listeners, are there any and I know you’ve already mentioned some, but which strategies can we use to evaluate an article? And I’m thinking mostly of the general public, if they find this random article online? Can they identify if this is a real article or if it might come from a paper mill? 

[00:27:23.870] – Dorothy Bishop  

Well, I think it’s very difficult. There are a few things that are obvious, like the tortured phrases. I mean, if you have a paper on Parkinson’s disease and instead of talking about Parkinson’s disease, it talks about Parkinson’s ailment or Parkinson’s malady, there’s quite a lot of literature that does that. It’s important to be aware that’s very unlikely to be just because somebody’s not got English as their first language. Because even if you don’t have that, you’ll be reading the literature. It’s all about Parkinson’s disease. So that sort of substitution suggests that something fishy has gone on and somebody’s deliberately trying to obscure the fact that work is plagiarized. So torture phrases is one good clue. A very rapid turnaround time, which isn’t always reported in a journal, but is sometimes reported in a journal, I regard as suspicious. I mean, you could just get lucky. This is probably it’s not 100% watertime. You could submit your paper and it’s immediately sent out for review and people immediately agree to review it. But anybody who has published papers knows that the usual thing is that it hangs around a bit before they can find reviewers and then the reviewers sit on it for a bit. 

[00:28:32.680] – Dorothy Bishop  

So we were talking in the Hindawi journals I was looking at, there were journals, special issues that were reliably managing to turn things around in two weeks from receipt to the first response. And that, I think is suspicious if it’s as fast as that or if there’s no requirement for revision in that time, if it goes in fact, not just receipt, but actual publication is really, really fast. So it’s not 100% watertight. But if I already had suspicions and I saw that, I’d think that was the case. The website pub peer is worth. I mean, you can check any article on Pub Peer and see if anybody’s commented on it. But of course it’s again, not 100%. Sometimes comments are not accurate, sometimes bad articles nobody’s picked up on. But you can then check back yourself with the paper and see, oh yes, that’s actually true, that that graph is copied, say, from another paper, or those numbers don’t add up right. Things like that will be reported on Pub here. So that’s another thing that you can check. But I think my general view is that we should go more for prevention than detection. 

[00:29:44.080] – Dorothy Bishop  

Again, a bit like with a virus. I mean, if you detect it, you want to do something about it. But the way we do science could be modified to make it much less easy for the paper mill people to operate. And here, most of the sort of methods of open science are quite effective in helping defend against it. There’s a very good cancer biologist, Jennifer Byrne, who’s argued for this in her field where. She’s picked up a lot of these really believable paper mill papers which have quite subtle errors in DNA sequences and things that you need to be really expert to pick out. But she said, well, if people had to pre register their papers or their studies and had to put in just as you do with clinical trials, you had to have a registry where before you did the study, you had to have protocol of what you were going to do. It wouldn’t be possible for people to do as much of this because the average study takes about a year to do. So you couldn’t rapidly be churning these things out. And if you have open data, that helps enormously because typically a paper mill paper will say that the data are available, but if you ask for it, it’s not. 

[00:30:54.470] – Dorothy Bishop  

And it’s often more trouble than it’s worth to generate fake data. So that’s not so common that they’ll do that. And open scripts. How did you analyze the data? An open peer review has proved invaluable. So you don’t necessarily have to have the names of the peer reviewers, but if you can just see the peer review, you can typically tell whether it’s normal peer review of a kind that engages with the content of the paper or whether it’s this very superficial stuff, which is clearly just hand waving. 

[00:31:26.570] – Ludmila Nunes  

So again, open science practices, creating a more transparent science can help this type of industrial fraud to be counteracted. 

[00:31:36.550] – Dorothy Bishop  

We can make it harder. I mean, the other way is, of course, as I said before, for the publishers to be very strict and to scrutinize editors better. But I think that you can make it just more trouble than it’s worth to generate a plausible fraudulent paper if you have stricter requirements of what people need to do to get published. 

[00:31:57.270] – Ludmila Nunes  

This is Ludmila Nunes with APS and I’ve been speaking to Dorothy Bishop from Oxford University. It was great having you and thank you so much for this stimulating conversation and discussing ways to improve our science. 

[00:32:13.950] – Dorothy Bishop  

Well, thank you very much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. 

[00:32:16.990] – Ludmila Nunes  

For more interesting research in psychological science, visit psychologicalscience.org. 

Is there any evidence that some of the fake papers are part of misinformation campaigns to undermine credibility of science generally?

Please investigate the articles from out of print journals from our 1950’s-1970,s that are allegedly being republished. Was the journal human performance one of them!?

As once an APS student chapter president, reviving a departmental library, the main library was sending us a boxes of out of print and duplicates. Between the main library and the department, few or several boxes disappeared. Then low and behold all the old published stuff became a forte for one the Labs! Every couple of years or so since then, we see a publication- somewhat archaic that is allegedly the same as from the lost pile!?

The Library of Congress may had ran all copyrighting work through a system that would detect repeated passages or sentences from past work in new work by different authors. Did they stop this practice?

Or, are a number of fraudulent “intelligence” persons involved in removing past copyrighted work (i.e. connecting to ownership of trillions) to then redeposit as their own– to take over the identities and old assets per se!?

Note worthy is the co-authorship of mRNA in paperback! You see how obscurely the second author name (who owns trillions) disappeared from the publication.

Conman-ship can take other forms, allegedly!

As once an APS student chapter president, reviving a departmental library, the main library was sending us boxes of out of print and duplicates. Between the main library and the department, few or several boxes disappeared. Then miraculously the old published stuff became a forte for one the Labs! Every couple of years or so since then, we see a publication- somewhat archaic that is allegedly the same as from the lost pile!?

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China’s fake science industry: how ‘paper mills’ threaten progress

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As part of his job as fraud detector at biomedical publisher Spandidos, John Chesebro trawls through research papers, scrutinising near identical images of cells. For him, the tricks used by “paper mills” — the outfits paid to fabricate scientific studies — have become wearily familiar.

They range from clear duplication — the same images of cell cultures on microscope slides copied across numerous, unrelated studies — to more subtle tinkering. Sometimes an image is rotated “to try to trick you to think it’s different”, Chesebro says. “At times you can detect where parts of an image were digitally manipulated to add or remove cells or other features to make the data look like the results you are expecting in the hypothesis.” He estimates he rejects 5 to 10 per cent of papers because of fraudulent data or ethical issues.

Spandidos, based in Athens and London, accepts a large volume of papers from China, with around 90 per cent of its output coming from Chinese authors. In the mid-2010s, independent scientists accused Spandidos of publishing papers with results that recycled the same sets of data. As part of its response to the allegations, the publisher is using a team of in-house fraud detectors to weed out and retract fake research.

Over the past two decades, Chinese researchers have become some of the world’s most prolific publishers of scientific papers . The Institute for Scientific Information, a US-based research analysis organisation, calculated that China produced 3.7mn papers in 2021 — 23 per cent of global output — and just behind the 4.4mn total from the US.

At the same time, China has been climbing the ranks of the number of times a paper is cited by other authors, a metric used to judge output quality. Last year, China surpassed the US for the first time in the number of most cited papers, according to Japan’s National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, although that figure was flattered by multiple references to Chinese research that first sequenced the Covid-19 virus genome.

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The soaring output has sparked concern in western capitals. Chinese advances in high-profile fields such as quantum technology, genomics and space science , as well as Beijing’s surprise hypersonic missile test two years ago, have amplified the view that China is marching towards its goal of achieving global hegemony in science and technology.

That concern is a part of a wider breakdown of trust in some quarters between western institutions and Chinese ones, with some universities introducing background checks on Chinese academics amid fears of intellectual property theft.

But experts say that China’s impressive output masks systemic inefficiencies and an underbelly of low-quality and fraudulent research. Academics complain about the crushing pressure to publish to gain prized positions at research universities.

“To survive in Chinese academia, we have many KPIs [key performance indicators] to hit. So when we publish, we focus on quantity over quality,” says a physics lecturer from a prominent Beijing university. “When prospective employers look at our CVs, it is much easier for them to judge the quantity of our output over the quality of the research,” he adds.

The world’s scientific publishers are becoming increasingly alarmed by the scale of fraud. An investigation last year by their joint Committee on Publication Ethics (Cope) concluded: “The submission of suspected fake research papers . . . is growing and threatens to overwhelm the editorial processes of a significant number of journals.”

The problem is that no publisher — even the most vigilant — has the capacity to weed out all the frauds. Retractions are rare and can take years. In the meantime scientists may be building on a fake paper’s findings. In the biomedical sphere this is all the more worrying when the aim of a lot of research is the development of treatments for serious diseases.

Bernhard Sabel, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, is one of many journal editors calling for “swift global action to restore the health of the scientific record and to prevent the erosion of trust in science”. “Science and ‘true love’ have two things in common: both are infatuated by passion, and both rely on trust,” Sabel says. “If trust is lost, it is very hard to go back.”

Brokers and ‘busybodies’

The proliferation of dubious research that has accompanied China ’s emergence as a scientific and technological powerhouse has caught the attention of a number of independent scholars who are policing the country’s output.

One of them is David Bimler, a psychologist formerly at Massey University in New Zealand. He identified 150 biomedical papers from Jilin University that used the same few data sets and concluded that the institution had an internal paper mill. Jilin University was cited by two other experts who spoke to the Financial Times as a top offender for generating fake research. Jilin University did not respond to a request for comment.

“They probably never thought that busybodies would start paying attention to their papers, because they didn’t try to hide the mass production very well,” Bimler says.

The publishers’ organisation Cope describes paper mills as “profit oriented, unofficial and potentially illegal organisations that produce and sell fraudulent manuscripts that seem to resemble genuine research”.

Estimates of the extent of fake scientific output vary enormously, from 2 per cent to 20 per cent or more of published papers. Extrapolating from his own research, Sabel puts paper mills’ global revenues at a minimum of €1bn a year and probably much more. There is general agreement that China is one of the world’s worst offenders, Sabel says, though Cope points out the paper mills are “by no means confined to China”.

Online brokers selling written-to-order papers proliferate on Chinese ecommerce sites such as Taobao. One broker advertising recently on Taobao charged clients $800 for a submission to a middle-tier domestic medical publication.

“Scientific misconduct is an organised practice and has been run as a business almost always half openly,” says a Chinese medical researcher based in the US. She explains that fraudulent papers from low-tier universities, which use cheaper paper mills, are easier to spot. They tend to recycle the same fraudulent data sets multiple times, while academics at more prestigious universities may purchase “leftover” experimental data from other researchers.

Beijing has introduced penalties on the use of paper mills, including banning offending researchers from applying for government funding. But weak enforcement means the practice is still rife.

Chesebro says that a typical red flag is when authors refuse to share the underlying data that supports their hypothesis. “I’ve seen every excuse. Two dozen times, researchers have said their computer was broken. I have heard of five author deaths, a dozen or so authors that left the institute and are no longer contactable,” he says.

While academics around the world have to publish to advance their careers, the pressure in China is exacerbated by the scale of competition fighting for limited resources. The ISI estimates that there are more than 2mn researchers in China competing for funds from central and local governments. The physics lecturer says this creates an “institutionalised incentive to cheat” to hit targets for citations and publication output. Academics that publish in top journals are awarded cash bonuses at some universities, although this practice is increasingly frowned on.

Cathie Martin, a botanist at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, who runs exchanges and joint programmes with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is enthusiastic about the abilities of the Chinese researchers who work in her plant science lab. But she is well aware of the pressures on them.

“All aspects of scientific research in China are based on publications — not only the positions that you are offered but the grade of position,” she says. “If one of my guys is looking for a position back in China, very often they’ll be told: ‘You can apply to our institution if you get one more paper’, and then they’ll tell you the level of the journal you have to publish in.”

The medical sphere has a particularly bad reputation for producing fake research because clinicians are required to publish to climb the hospital hierarchy, forcing time-poor doctors to outsource to paper mills.

Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist in California who highlights cases of bad science, was part of a team that examined 20,000 biomedical papers from authors around the world and found that 800 had instances of “inappropriately duplicated images”. “Papers from China had a higher than average chance of containing problematic images,” she says.

Prominent scientists have been found to produce dodgy research, too. Bik says she uncovered 50 papers by a well-known immunologist working in China “with varying problems from small to heavily manipulated images”. The Chinese government decided after an official review that “he was not responsible for any of these manipulated images”, Bik adds. “He got a little slap on the wrist but nothing serious. He is still publishing.” 

Can you spot the image manipulation?

Two fluorescent microscopy images in a paper authored by Chinese academics purport to show the results of different experiments . . .

 . . . but they share a lot of features that have simply been mirrored

‘Sea turtle’ backlash

The scrutiny of fake Chinese research has exacerbated the mistrust between western and Chinese academic institutions, which was already growing as a consequence of fraying geopolitical relations — and allegations that researchers from China are using their time in overseas labs to steal intellectual property.

“In view of the increasing geopolitical tensions, we are conducting background checks [of applicants from China] in relation to our grants and other activities, whenever and wherever this is relevant,” says Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, chief executive of the Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of Denmark’s largest funders of academic research. “We do this based on recommendations from the authorities and in collaboration with our grant recipients.”

China has swiftly and indisputably become the world leader in the commercialisation of research as measured by patents. The World Intellectual Property Organization says the country’s patent office received 1.6mn applications in 2021, compared with 600,000 for its US counterpart.

Such activity has unsettled western governments, who have erected barriers for many Chinese science and tech researchers coming to their universities, fearing that these academic exchanges have contributed to the country’s rapid global ascension. Several Chinese researchers in the US have been arrested under suspicion of leaking intellectual property to China under a Donald Trump-era programme to root out economic espionage.

“Some of the growing hostility and suspicion [in the west] is around legitimate areas of concern, some of it is paranoid and daft,” says James Wilsdon, professor of research policy at University College London. “But there are now many examples of Chinese science and technology espionage and dodgy practices.”

As countries that have been “big contributors to the growth of collaborative science” decelerate their engagement, the prospects for China’s research output “are far more uncertain” than they have been in the recent past, Wilsdon adds.

In China, academics with international training are most likely to be published in leading publications. Qingnan Xie, an intellectual property expert at Harvard University, found that 76 per cent of articles published in the Nature and Science journals from Chinese addresses had an author who had studied overseas before returning to the mainland.

The culture [in China] is more one of systematic thinking building on other research, whereas the west tends to applaud individualism

Beijing has bankrolled the massive outbound movement of science graduates to study in universities from Tokyo to San Francisco and London through scholarships and grants, providing incentives to return to the mainland once they’ve completed their education.

This so-called “sea turtle” strategy is one pillar in a broader policy to develop an indigenous scientific and technological power base. It has “fostered international collaboration and lifted standards in China”, says Steven Inchcoombe, president for research at Springer Nature.  

As geopolitical tensions erode the trust needed to keep collaborative ventures alive, scientists say both sides are set to lose out. For many labs worldwide, Chinese researchers are a crucial source of labour to participate in large-scale experiments. Western researchers benefit from access to cheap and well-educated Chinese PhD students who can help bolster their findings by running experiments.

“China is very good at application and refinement,” says Inchcoombe. “But the culture is more one of systematic thinking building on other research, whereas the west tends to applaud individualism. China doesn’t seem to see the need for standout heroes in the same way.”

The physics lecturer in Beijing makes a similar point. “American or British scientists tend to have breakthrough ideas and do truly innovative research,” he says. “Chinese are quick learners. They help to find evidence and make the framework more solid.” 

Carsten Fink, chief economist at the World Intellectual Property Organization, says Chinese innovation is strikingly successful when researchers are able to “leapfrog” over existing technology into a new field. One example is Beijing’s strategy of focusing investment on electric vehicle production rather than the already saturated combustion engine market. Another is the country’s domination of global solar panel production .

Jonathan Adams, chief scientist at ISI, points out that China’s international collaborations are “strongly biased towards physical sciences: information and communication sciences, materials and areas like that — and particularly so in the US. In some areas of US research, 80 per cent of publications have a China address for a co-author.”

Discovering the extent of Chinese involvement in US research had come as “a complete surprise” to some American policymakers, Adams says. “They were quite unaware of how far Chinese research had moved to underpin what they were doing. The most highly cited US-authored research in a lot of these technology areas is co-authored with China.”

Advocates for science in the US are working to ensure that collaboration with China does not collapse completely. “Our culture of science is a beacon for Chinese scientists,” says Sudip Parikh, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “They help to enrich our economy and our labs. These intellectual relationships matter and it is important that we don’t lose the big picture of the benefits of international collaboration.”

If scientific ties with the west break down, the individuals who will suffer most are diligent Chinese academics, as an atmosphere of distrust and the country’s reputation for fraudulent research make it more difficult for them to gain international recognition.

“The worst impact is on sincere Chinese researchers,” says Bimler. “There is enough junk coming from China that researchers privately admit that they don’t read papers if they’re from a Chinese source . . . Scientists don’t have time to determine what is junk and what isn’t.” 

Additional reporting by Wang Xueqiao in Shanghai

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‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point

Last year, 10,000 sham papers had to be retracted by academic journals, but experts think this is just the tip of the iceberg

Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.

Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud .

“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”

The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.

The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying ­fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young ­scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of ­falsified work to be published.

“Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money,” said Professor Alison Avenell of Aberdeen University. “It is deeply worrying.”

The products of paper mills often look like regular articles but are based on templates in which names of genes or diseases are slotted in at random among fictitious tables and figures. Worryingly, these articles can then get incorporated into large databases used by those working on drug discovery.

Others are more bizarre and include research unrelated to a journal’s field, making it clear that no peer review has taken place in relation to that article. An example is a paper on Marxist ideology that appeared in the journal Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine . Others are distinctive because of the strange language they use, including references to “bosom peril” rather than breast cancer and “Parkinson’s ailment” rather Parkinson’s disease.

Watchdog groups – such as Retraction Watch – have tracked the problem and have noted retractions by journals that were forced to act on occasions when fabrications were uncovered. One study, by Nature , revealed that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.

Of this last total, more than 8,000 retracted papers had been published in journals owned by Hindawi, a subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, figures that have now forced the company to act. “We will be sunsetting the Hindawi brand and have begun to fully integrate the 200-plus Hindawi journals into Wiley’s ­portfolio,” a Wiley spokesperson told the Observer .

The spokesperson added that Wiley had now identified hundreds of fraudsters present in its portfolio of journals, as well as those who had held guest editorial roles. “We have removed them from our systems and will continue to take a proactive … approach in our efforts to clean up the scholarly record, strengthen our integrity processes and contribute to cross-industry solutions.”

But Wiley insisted it could not tackle the crisis on its own, a message echoed by other publishers, which say they are under siege from paper mills. Academics remain cautious, however. The problem is that in many countries, academics are paid according to the number of papers they have published.

“If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm,” said Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University. “That is exactly what we have now.”

The harm done by publishing poor or fabricated research is demonstrated by the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Early laboratory studies indicated it could be used to treat Covid-19 and it was hailed as a miracle drug. However, it was later found these studies showed clear evidence of fraud, and medical authorities have refused to back it as a treatment for Covid.

“The trouble was, ivermectin was used by anti-vaxxers to say: ‘We don’t need vaccination because we have this wonder drug,’” said Jack Wilkinson at Manchester University. “But many of the trials that underpinned those claims were not authentic.”

Wilkinson added that he and his colleagues were trying to develop protocols that researchers could apply to reveal the authenticity of studies that they might include in their own work. “Some great science came out during the pandemic, but there was an ocean of rubbish research too. We need ways to pinpoint poor data right from the start.”

The danger posed by the rise of the paper mill and fraudulent research papers was also stressed by Professor Malcolm MacLeod of Edinburgh University. “If, as a scientist, I want to check all the papers about a particular drug that might target cancers or stroke cases, it is very hard for me to avoid those that are fabricated. Scientific knowledge is being polluted by made-up material. We are facing a crisis.”

This point was backed by Bishop: “People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science and could end up running scientific institutes and eventually be used by mainstream journals as reviewers and editors. Corruption is creeping into the system.”

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Back to school

Inside a highly lucrative, ethically questionable essay-writing service

Killer Papers is a seven-figure academic “paper mill” business. But its products are just for inspiration, its founder insists.

Kevin says he’s always been known as a good writer — a reputation that only blossomed in his Canadian high school.

“Word spread pretty quick around my 700-person school that I’m the best writer in the school,” he recalls.

The word spread to 15-year-old Kevin’s workplace, McDonald’s, where he flipped burgers. His teenage colleagues began joking with him, saying they’d pay $20 for him to write their papers. “It sounded funny at first,” Kevin says. “Then eventually, I was like: Twenty bucks? That’s more than I make in three hours .”

So he said yes.

Kevin (an alias) estimates he wrote around 50 papers for his high school classmates before moving on to college in the Northeast U.S. There, he worked at the university’s writing center and tutored fellow students in economics. After graduating, he got a job in finance and recommenced his paper-writing hustle, this time for college students.

“The stereotypical [client] is ‘ daddy’s credit card.’ But the vast majority of the people that use the service — and I’m talking 90 percent — have a job .”

In December 2016, he formalized his essay-writing services, launching an Instagram profile and website that he called Killer Papers . Kevin wrote the first hundred or so papers for free. “I did it just to get reviews and knowing that word would spread eventually,” he says. It worked.

By August 2017, he was charging $10 per page, and he’d earned enough to quit his full-time job, which he hated. “That first year, I made $50,000 from the business,” he says.

Killer Papers, based in Canada, is one of a number of so-called essay mills that write papers for clients in exchange for money. And as kids head back to school this fall, business in the industry is about to pick up. “A slow month is August, and a busy month is October,” Kevin says.

He now has around 60 writers who produce between 200 and a thousand papers a month, with prices ranging from $17.50 to $32 per page. Though Kevin is coy about sharing specific numbers, he will allow that the site’s revenue is in “the low seven figures.”

With paper mills, the quality of the end product varies wildly, depending on which service you use and what price you pay. The Killer Papers site emphasizes that its writers “are ALL American or Canadian college graduates,” in contrast to cheaper overseas competitors that employ writers for whom English is a second language.

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But Killer Papers isn’t a paper mill, the company insists. “Killer Papers is a tutoring service,” reads a disclaimer on the site. “KillerPapers.org custom projects are not intended to be forwarded as finalized work for academic credit as they are only strictly meant to be used for research and study purposes. Killer Papers does not endorse or condone any type of plagiarism.”

Those who use Killer Paper’s services generally fall into two camps. “The stereotypical one is ‘daddy’s credit card,’” Kevin says. But that isn’t his core customer base. “The vast majority of the people that use the service — and I’m talking 90 percent — have a job. A lot of them are older than you might expect.” They’re people, Kevin says, whose busy lives mean they don’t have the proper amount of time to dedicate to their classwork.

Killer Papers user Deke (not his real name), a 24-year-old from Texas, was more of the stereotype than the average customer. He first heard about the service from a friend during his freshman year of college, where he was studying marketing. Deke estimates that he paid more than $1,000 for around 10 papers. “I know I spent a pretty penny, and that’s probably because I’m fortunate enough to have family support me on the financial side,” he says.

Deke says he used Killer Papers to help him with his heavy course load, which he took on so he could expedite his entry into the working world. He admits he never told his family where their hard-earned cash was going. “Even if I tried to explain to them, they’re immigrants and didn’t really go to school,” he says. “They wouldn’t really comprehend it.”

Deke claims he never submitted a paper that wasn’t his own work. “When I got the papers back, I tweaked them,” Deke says. “I worked on them.” He says that the essay-writing service helped him come up with the concepts and ideas for his essays. “That’s where I really needed help. When it came to opening up a Word document to type stuff, I just kind of blanked out. I’m like, Where do I start? ”

Deke got As for every essay he submitted except for one — the result of an uber-strict professor, he says. He graduated in 2020 and started working for an NFL team; he’s now employed in the oil and gas industry. “It helped me out pretty well in terms of getting me to where I am now,” he says. He adds that his fear of the blank page has disappeared, and he’s able to proficiently write reports for his job.

Ethical questions

Passing off someone else’s work as your own — plagiarism — isn’t illegal. But it is unethical.

Thomas Lancaster, senior teaching fellow in computing at Imperial College London, has been studying academic integrity, and essay mills’ role in destroying it, for more than 20 years. “Students see lots of temptation,” he says. “They see offers to do work for them, often disguised in the form of saying it’s ‘support’ or ‘help,’ not directly linking itself to being cheating. A lot of this is deceptive, and there’s a lot of blurring the lines between cheating and acceptability.”

Beyond the impact paper mills have on the value of academic degrees, Lancaster worries about the effect they have on students. “For students who think they’re just buying one piece of work, the problem is they then miss out on some of the core foundational knowledge we expect them to have,” he says. “When they go on to do a later assignment, they just struggle to do it.”

“We’re informing clients before they sign up that we’re not encouraging them to plagiarize anything.”

Those involved in essay-writing services deny that they’re damaging the integrity of the educational system. Courtney, who is in her 20s and lives on the East Coast, has been working with Killer Papers since 2018. She was an English and education undergrad at college and moved into teaching kids. “I felt very confident in my ability to proofread and edit and provide pretty much any writing service,” she says. “I just really enjoy writing.”

She signed up for Killer Papers, she says, because while she felt confident in her ability to craft an essay, she was conscious others might not. “I really liked the idea that it was providing support for students who might not have the same skill set that I had,” she says. “It felt nice to be able to help people.”

In March 2022, she left her job teaching and became a full-time essay writer for Killer Papers. In part, it was the money, but she also felt like the pandemic’s disruption of education meant she couldn’t make as much of an impact on kids’ learning as she wanted to. She tries to write between 15 and 30 assignments a week, depending on length. That allows her to match her $45,000 teacher’s salary, she says.

When she’s asked how she feels about the morality of what she does, Courtney demurs. “We’re informing clients before they sign up that we’re not encouraging them to plagiarize anything,” she says. “And we’re not encouraging them to submit any work.” Kevin, Killer Papers’ founder, makes similar points. “They’re assigned limited usage rights,” he says. “Basically, it’s for inspiration or study purposes. You’re not allowed to reuse it or anything like that.”

Kevin says that you wouldn’t hold a gun manufacturer liable for what someone does with a firearm so you shouldn’t hold Killer Papers liable for any students who decide to submit work the service produces as their own. “Everybody has free will,” he says.

When Input points out that many people do think gun manufacturers should be held liable, Kevin counters that you wouldn’t hold alcohol producers responsible for the actions of someone who’s drunk. When Input points out that cigarettes are similar — and that the tobacco industry has been held liable for its impact — and asks whether he really doesn’t believe kids aren’t passing off his essays as their own, Kevin asks to go off the record.

Courtney holds the line firm. “It’s fabulous to support students any way that they need, but in the same way that I couldn’t control my students in the classroom not submitting homework, I also can’t control what a student does with content that’s been submitted to them,” she says. “They’ve signed an agreement that they’ve read on the site, and they see we’re not condoning it in the slightest.”

“ People in general assume that I really don’t care about the product I’m producing, and I’m just doing as many as possible to make money. That’s just not accurate .”

That she’s part of an industry fueling cheating is the biggest misconception people have about her work, she says. “People in general assume that I really don’t care about the product I’m producing, and I’m just doing as many as possible to make money,” she says. “That’s just not accurate. I genuinely care about supporting students, and I want them to feel confident in the process.

“I encourage feedback,” she continues. “I encourage questions and critiques and everything, because not only does that help me to improve, but it makes them feel more comfortable that I’m not just some robot or some random individual with no other purpose than a paycheck.” Such communication happens via a chat function on the website.

Kevin’s vision for the future of Killer Papers is a confusing one. “I don’t see a world where three years from now we’re still selling custom essays, to be honest with you,” he says. Instead, he foresees the essay-writing service disappearing, to be replaced by bona fide tutoring services. Meaning Killer Papers may someday rebrand. “We need a name that transcends essay writing, to be something that can compete with [high-profile online tutoring service] Varsity Tutors,” he says.

Perhaps it’s a tacit admission that he wants to go totally legit. In a pre-interview email to Input , Kevin struck a more reflective tone regarding what he does for a living. “The reason I thought I picked this business initially is because I was good at writing, I liked writing, and people were willing to pay me to do it,” he shares.

“But the truth is, I picked it because I was desperate and knew I had what it took to make it work, at least enough to get me out of the corporate job and two-hour commute I hated,” Kevin continues. “If I hadn’t been so desperate, maybe I’d be changing the world right now.”

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Trump Media’s accounting firm accused of massive fraud as a ‘sham audit mill’ that created false papers, did nonexistent work, and fabricated meetings

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the auditor of Donald Trump’s social-media company of massive fraud that affected more than 1,500 regulatory filings.

BF Borgers CPA PC and its founder, Benjamin Borgers, will be permanently suspended from practicing and appearing as accountants before the SEC, and will pay a total of $14 million in fines to settle the probe, the SEC said in a Friday  release .

“Ben Borgers and his audit firm, BF Borgers, were responsible for one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets,” Gurbir Grewal, the SEC’s enforcement chief, said in a statement. “Because investors rely on the audited financial statements of public companies when making their investment decisions, the accountants and accounting firms that audit those statements play a critical role in our financial markets. Borgers and his firm completely abandoned that role, but thanks to the painstaking work of the SEC staff, Borgers and his sham audit mill have been permanently shut down.”

BF Borgers didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning. The firm has been one of the most prolific auditors in the US. The most recent review of its audits by US regulators found a 100% deficiency rate. In its order, the SEC described false audit work papers, “nonexistent work” and fabricated meetings.

The SEC didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on BF Borgers’ work for Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. Trump Media “looks forward to working with new auditing partners in accordance with today’s SEC order,” a representative for the company said. 

The regulator’s settlement with BF Borgers didn’t say whether Trump Media was one of the companies whose filings involved alleged fraud by the accounting firm. 

Trump Media has used the Colorado-based accounting firm since 2022, and retained its services after it went public by merging with Digital World Acquisitions Corp., a special purpose acquisition company. Inspections by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board haven’t yet covered BF Borgers’ audits of Trump Media. 

The former president’s social-media company was the biggest client by market capitalization on BF Borgers’ client roster. Although the firm is one of the busiest in the US, more than 80% of its clients trade over-the-counter, meaning they are too small to meet the listing requirements of large exchanges, according to research firm Ideagen Audit Analytics.

BF Borgers was among the top 10 auditing firms with the most publicly traded clients in 2023, according to the firm.

The auditor has faced regulatory scrutiny in both Canada and the US. It scored poor marks on the last two annual inspections from the US audit regulator, with the PCAOB citing a 100% deficiency rate in the sample of audits it inspected for 2021 and 2022.

The audit watchdog said BF Borgers, which has hundreds of clients, more than doubled its clients between 2019 and 2021 but didn’t add more staff to handle the additional workload. Just one person was responsible for 147 audits, the regulator said in an expanded inspection report.

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