How Much Does it Cost to Purchase Authorship in an Academic Paper?

Last week, Lori Youmshajekian at Retraction Watch published a story about a pre-print paper published on arXiv that examined the paper mill industry and how much it charges to buy authorship in a paper.

The paper, published by Reese AK Richardson (Northwestern University), Spencer S Hong (Northwestern University), and Anna Abalkina (Freie Universität Berlin), examines their “BuyTheBy” dataset, which examines over 20,000 authorship positions across over 18,000 advertisements.

The results were striking. If you want to buy the first authorship position on a paper, you can do so for as little as $57 USD. While that is an extreme outlier, the average price is still barely higher than $1,000, and many publications can be found cheaper than that.

If you’re willing to take a lower position, you can expect to pay significantly less. If you’re willing to be the second author, you can expect to pay an average of $760. Third authors can expect to pay just $680.

Once again, in all cases, the median price is lower than the mean, indicating that there are plenty of cheaper authorships on offer.

To make matters worse, these services were ridiculously easy to find. Of the seven services analyzed, three operated on Telegram, and four operated on the open internet.

For anyone in research integrity, this is a scary issue. Such mills have gone from being a fringe issue to a mainstream concern. To make matters worse, the grift is only being made easier by the rise of AI.

So what can academia do about this problem? There aren’t any easy answers.

A Relatively New Problem

For students in the classroom, paper mills (or essay mills) have been a problem that well predates the internet. For decades, students have been tempted by advertisements for mail-order papers. They also used “frat file” systems and other exchanges to obtain ill-gotten papers.

We even saw this featured in a 1995 episode of the sitcom Boy Meets World.

The internet supercharged the essay mill problem, making it easier, cheaper, and less risky for students to buy papers. However, it didn’t really introduce anything new.

That changes when we look at the research side of things. Though authorship has always been somewhat fungible, it was largely an informal affair. One researcher giving another an authorship in exchange for one of their own later. Or, sometimes it was just done for a bad joke.

But research paper mills really began to grow as an industry in the early 2000s. At first, the problem seemed to be relatively minor. However, a study in 2023 found that over 2% of published papers resembled paper mill works.

What this latest study shows, more than anything, is just how easy and inexpensive it is to purchase authorship on a paper. One needs neither wealth nor great expertise to make the buy.

In fact, it’s easier and cheaper than purchasing copies of many of the journals that are targeted.

What The Paper Says

The study examined seven different businesses, labeled B1-B7, each from a different country. The countries included India, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. All of the businesses were available either through Telegram or a website and primarily targeted their region.

The study focused mostly on the advertisements that featured a price. This way, they could perform a statistical analysis of the prices for authorships of various positions.

They found, predictably, that the prices were highest for the first author and largely decreased as the position decreased.

But many of the prices were still staggering. For example, if you wanted to be the first author of an “international textbook,” you could do so for less than $50 USD. In most countries, you could purchase first authorship on a paper for less than $1,000 USD. In Ukraine and India, the average price was less than $500 USD.

The study also examined the publishers that the papers said they were targeting. Elsevier, IEEE, and Springer Nature were by far the most targeted. To be clear, the study does not examine whether any of those papers were published in the targeted journals.

That said, while the paper is interesting, there are a few caveats that I feel the need to mention.

Caveats and Limitations

The first thing to keep in mind is that the data set, while large, is not very diverse. Of the 18,710 advertisements, 12,915 of them, or 69%, were from B5, the Russian service. B1 was also overrepresented. Though it had fewer advertisements than B5 over 15,500 of the price data points.

However, only 1,667 of those advertisements were for the authorship of an article. The largest group was for textbook authorship but also included copyright and patent applications. Though these are related, they are very different in terms of market forces.

Ultimately, three of the businesses had fewer than 1,000 time-stamped price data points, and one, B2, only had 142.

Generally, I would have stopped tracking authorship slots after 5. Though the study tracked 10 slots, slots six through ten totaled less than 238 ads. That’s not really enough to draw any conclusions from, and it produces some weird results in the authorship slot table.

Finally, I’m not sure how representative one business is of each country.

To be clear, the authors actually acknowledge these limitations. They admit that their selection of websites was not systematic and was “motivated by informal selection criteria.”

The goal of the study is not to be a comprehensive analysis of the problem, but rather, a starting point for further research.

Bottom Line

The low price and ease of purchase is something of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it does mean that unethical researchers can purchase authorship more easily. The easier it is to do something, the more likely it is that people will do it.

But, on the other hand, the low prices could mean a glut of supply in the market. While it is true that AI is supercharging the writing process, getting papers “published” with any credibility requires a lot more than just a paper.

You need a reputable place to publish it. Sure, you can simply submit to real journals, but you can’t guarantee that they will accept it. Instead, you need to hijack journals (Note: Anna Abalkina from the study maintains Retraction Watch’s database of hijacked journals), create fake journals, or take other steps to convincingly publish the paper.

So the question becomes: Is it so easy to purchase authorship because it is so easy to overcome these hurdles, or is the supply more limited but still far exceeds the demand?

That’s a difficult question that this study wasn’t designed to answer. What is clear is that, if you are an unethical researcher looking to purchase authorship, it is both easy and inexpensive to do so.

The market is there, waiting with open arms, for those that want it.

In the end, the only real solution to pivot the culture of academia away from the “publish or perish” model and find ways to require high quality, rather than high quantity, output. That is not an easy problem to solve, but it’s one that becomes more and more urgent every year.