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Ghostwriters in the scientific world

Sankalp yadav.

1 General Duty Medical Officer-II, Department of Medicine & TB, Chest Clinic Moti Nagar, New Delhi, India

Gautam Rawal

2 Associate Consultant, Department, of Respiratory Intensive Care, Max Super Specialty Hospital, New Delhi, India

The scientific world is facing a constant problem of ghostwriters. These ghostwriters are often attached to the medical publishing houses and are involved in writing an article for a pharmaceutical company which may, in turn, use the name of an established or a famous scientist as an author to the article. Often, such articles are published in well-known journals and are circulating widely. Many a time the adverse effects are overlooked in such papers. This will result in a corrupt practice of prescribing a drug which is not scientifically useful or may have life-threatening side effects. In this present article, the authors discuss this evil practice of ghostwriting in the context of the present day scientific publishing.

Introduction

The scientific writing is an important part of the skill and career development [ 1 ]. The scientific world is full of medical journal publishing articles that lay the foundation of the future practice of medicine. However, in the context of this, there is a continuing problem of ghostwriting [ 2 ]. The term ghost authorship means that an individual who contributed substantially to a manuscript is not named in the byline or acknowledgments [ 2 , 3 ]. The ghostwriters came after the development of professional medical writers in the late 20 th century [ 4 ]. There are thousands of such medical/ghost writers around the globe [ 4 ]. The international organizations like the International Committee for Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) do not even acknowledge their existence [ 4 ]. As per the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA), the ghostwriter is the one who prepares a manuscript for an author, but the writer is not given an authorship [ 5 ]. The whole concept of ghostwriting could have been based on the need for the conversion of the raw data to an intelligible document [ 4 ]. However, it has been abused to a greater extent and even established biomedical journals are not spared [ 4 , 6 ]. A study reported that even the Cochrane Reviews has 39% of authors who do not qualify to be the real authors and do not match the authorship guidelines set by the ICJME and of this 11% were ghost authors [ 7 , 8 ]. In this paper the authors, highlight the issues associated with ghostwriting.

The authors searched the term “ghost author”, “ghostwriter” and “ghost authorship” on Google and read the scholarly articles. Besides, a similar search was made on the PubMed to study the gravity of this problem looming large in the scientific world. A detailed overview of this malpractice and possible solutions are suggested in this paper.

The extent of ghostwriting is very wide. The ghostwritten industry-sponsored articles are a common unethical practice and continue to plague biomedical journals which publish industry-sponsored research [ 9 - 12 ]. Healy reported that the major amount of pharmaceutical articles was ghostwritten [ 13 ]. Flanagin et al. 1998, reported that a substantial proportion of articles (up to 11%) in six peer-reviewed medical journals demonstrate evidence of ghost authors [ 14 ]. Stretton 2014, in her paper, reported the details of six cross-sectional surveys in which the prevalence of possible ghostwriting varied from 0.9% to 24.1% [ 12 , 14 - 18 ]. Also, four cross-sectional survey publications reported the prevalence of ghostwriting/author varied from 0.7% to 70% of publications or authors [ 12 ]. As per the recent studies in the British Journal of Psychiatry and the JAMA, around 11% to 50% of the articles on pharmaceuticals that appear in the major biomedical journals may actually be ghostwritten [ 19 , 20 ]. In a detailed study Gøtzsche et al 2007, reported the extent to be around 75% [ 21 ].

Why ghostwriting ? The extent of ghostwriting is very large [ 22 ]. The majority of the scientific data that becomes available due to a large number of researches going in the various fields needs to be converted into a presentable scientific document [ 23 ]. One way to do so is by the use of professional medical writers who ethically help the researchers to bring the raw data into an intelligible document [ 23 ]. The other is by Medical Education and Communications Company or MECC, that includes a number of professional experts in the field of scientific writing and editing [ 23 , 24 ]. These MECC is industry funded and is paid to write articles in favor of the products of the company [ 24 ]. However, if the legitimate services of medical writing agencies or independent writers are used for the vested interest in order to write something for a product or drug overlooking the adverse effects then this constitutes the ghostwriting [ 23 ]. Many times the ghostwriters are funded by the big pharmaceutical companies [ 24 ]. The main principle for this practice is that the pharmaceutical companies fund the ghostwriters to prepare the manuscript which is forwarded to an established scientist in the field who may or may not be allowed to make changes and in turn, is sent to a reputed journal for publication [ 24 ]. The expert scientist is sometimes not even aware of the funding for this malpractice [ 22 ]. These industry-funded ghostwritten articles are aimed to bring the positive side of the drug and many a time overlooking the adverse effects of the drug [ 24 ]. The reputed journals are often chosen, as this brings credibility to the scientific data in the paper [ 22 ]. The higher the repute of the journal bigger will be its audience and higher will be the number of citations, thus adding weight to the actual paper [ 22 ]. The manuscript published is circulated all over the world and in this way the pharmaceutical companies make huge profits from the sales of the drug recommended by an expert in a reputed journal [ 24 ]. It has been well reported in the medical literature that the ghostwriters have been paid huge funds [ 22 , 25 ].

Some famous examples : The grave problem of ghostwriting is evident by really famous examples like the marketing of drugs Fen-Phen, SSRIs, Neurontin, Zoloft, Redux, Vioxx, etc [ 22 , 25 , 26 ]. The manuscripts which were published on these drugs were ghostwritten and the side-effects were totally ignored [ 22 ]. The ghostwritten papers were in large quantities, thus ensuring a favorable outcome in support of the investigational drug even if the efficacy of the drug is reviewed by a meta-analysis [ 22 ]. The actual problem with the whole process of ghostwriting is grave because of non-transparency in the data presented [ 13 ]. Resulting in serious ramifications on the public health [ 24 ]. The ghostwriting has been also considered as an institutionalized plagiarism [ 22 ]. However, there are guidelines which recommend that anybody involved in the plagiarism should be subjected to strict disciplinary action [ 22 ]. These punishments could even involve the retraction of the paper [ 1 ]. But only a small number of all the retracted articles are ever annulled due to plagiarism [ 1 ]. The EMWA recommends that the authors of the biomedical papers should be in full control of the papers even if the same is written by an expert medical writer [ 5 ]. The role of medical writers should be clearly defined and mentioned either as an author in a review paper (if a substantial contribution is there and willingness to share responsibility is present) or in the acknowledgements or the contributors' section [ 5 , 27 - 30 ]. The interaction between the professional writers and the real authors of a manuscript should be clearly defined using the GATE principles based on the Guarantee, Advice, Transparency, and Expertise as defined elsewhere [ 23 , 28 ]. But the huge amount of funds involved in the ghostwriting and the same provided to the experts just for the sake of taking their name for a biased research, usually funded by a big industry is resulting in dubious data being published in reputed journals thereby putting the public health in jeopardy [ 24 ]. The importance of ethical authorship and good publication practices is extremely important [ 31 ]. The malpractice of ghostwriting is not only present in the pharmaceutical articles, but the same is present in academia as well [ 31 ]. The journals and the medical publishing houses have to take radical steps to curb this problem of ghostwriting [ 23 ]. The industries that fund these will never control it [ 22 ]. The peer-reviewed data are an important part of making health care paradigms and thus the false information will lead to serious consequences on the public health [ 2 ]. The impact could be devastating, especially in the developing countries with low expenditure on health and where the per capita income is low and where the problem of corruption is very big [ 32 , 33 ].

The good aspects of professional medical writing : There is a small but clear line of demarcation between a professional medical writer and a ghostwriter [ 23 ]. Although the ghostwriting is having serious impacts on the science, there are some good points in favor of an ethical medical writer, if appropriately acknowledged [ 19 ]. First, an assisted scientific writing brings the results of the research to the public which, if left to senior clinicians would never be reported due to their busy schedule [ 23 , 19 ]. Also, it has been observed that the senior clinicians may not be familiar with the details of the literature to produce a timely and comprehensive text [ 23 , 28 ]. Secondly, the overall paper quality will be superior due to professional writing as the medical writers are the specialist in writing a manuscript [ 23 , 19 ]. Third, based on the scientific data the adverse drug reactions could well be reported comprehensively in an industry-sponsored research [ 19 , 34 ]. Fourth, that some professional writing agencies may disclose the conflicts of interest more clearly [ 19 ]. Fifth, the clinicians, especially from developing countries have a huge burden of clinical works in addition to the research work and thus the services of professional medical writers will help with the publication of their work and thus will be made available to the general public [ 23 ]. This is also supported by the fact that every year the reputed journals return several important manuscripts for revision or even reject them due to poor writing styles, poor organization of the content and even poor English and grammar [ 23 , 35 , 36 ]. Sixth, the professional writers bring clarity to the articles as if the same may be lacking, then the actual idea that the authors want to communicate may be lost [ 23 , 37 , 38 ]. The professional medical writers are legitimate contributors to the article [ 39 , 40 ]. They are a blessing while ghostwriters are intellectually dishonest, unethical and a curse [ 41 ].

To control this problem, a group of medical writers developed the EMWA [ 42 ]. The purpose of EMWA is to identify the issues with the malpractice of ghostwriting in scientific literature and also to suggest the ways to curb it [ 42 ]. The ghostwriting can be controlled if the stakeholders like journals, authors, medical writing agencies and the agencies involved in supervising the publications work in unison [ 23 , 43 ]. At any stage of the peer review if any, involvement of ghostwriter is suspected by the reviewers then the same should be reported to the editors [ 23 ]. The editors must ensure that a contributorship statement is submitted by the authors [ 23 ]. The section for instruction to authors should include guidance for authorship and acknowledgement [ 23 ]. The ICJME has published important criteria for authorship and also the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) developed a specific policy on ghostwriting [ 41 , 44 ]. Besides, the function of the medical writer in preparing biomedical journal manuscripts is of interest to task forces convened by American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) and EMWA and has resulted in articles of guidelines for medical writers in preparing the scientific documents [ 4 ]. Even after the presence of guidelines, it is very difficult to identify any involvement of an industry in the preparation of any manuscript. Also, if the industry has funded the research and has hired the writing agency then the published paper may become more authentic if the raw data on which the paper is based is also made available to the scientific community for an unbiased analysis and interpretation [ 45 ]. The ghostwriting has really gone to the roots of scientific research and efforts to control it are imperative.

What is known about this topic

  • Ghostwriting is prevalent in scientific literature and is underreported;
  • Large publication houses are also affected;
  • Reputed researchers are the target.

What this study adds

  • The extent of ghostwriting is between 0.9%-75%;
  • A substantial amount of scientific papers are ghostwritten, policy changes need to include strategies to reduce ghost authorship, in order to curb the overall extent of ghostwriting;
  • Emphasis on the development of guidelines similar to those developed by European Medical Writers Association (EMWA), throughout the world to control the malpractice of ghostwriting in scientific literature.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Authors’ contributions

All the authors have read and agreed to the final manuscript.

research paper ghostwriters

Ghostwriting in academic journals: How can we mitigate its impact on research integrity?

Research integrity

Christine Lee

Well-intentioned open access journals that engage in best practices have been a boon to the research community. But the flipside is that the burgeoning field of open access journals has given rise to fake journals, also known as predatory, deceptive, fraudulent, clone, or pseudo-journals (Beall, Nature 2012). These journals are ones that do not engage in peer review and have minimal or little copy edits. In other words, they exist primarily to extract publication fees from authors.

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Contract cheating –engaging a third party like an essay mill or even a friend or family member to submit work as one’s own–is an unquestionable form of academic misconduct. We’ve established that engaging in contract cheating hampers learning. To that end, there are now laws and activism against contract cheating in various regions around the world.

In academic research, other terms synonymous with contract cheating are more widely used; these words are ghostwriting or ghost authorship .

Ghostwriting is a term used to describe academic research written by someone whose name is not acknowledged. The third party may be anyone who engages in this behavior, including individuals hired by private companies in the industry that may provide undisclosed influence on research.

Ghostwriting may entail taking credit for an entire article written by a third party, crediting “honorary” authors for work they did not do, or not crediting junior researchers for their participation. When authors are named without having participated in research or writing, they are called “honorary” authors or “guest” authors and this related form of behavior also qualifies as misconduct.

The most egregious forms of ghostwriting are articles completely written by an industry representative about research in which the stated authors have taken no part, or articles written by industry that provide selective research outcomes to promote products of which the researchers and acknowledged authors are unaware.

In the world of medical writing, the misconduct of ghostwriting is particularly pervasive, as pharmaceutical companies often collaborate with researchers to promote products and support regulatory requests; in fact, the term for legitimately doing so is called publication planning and strategy . But when these contributions aren’t acknowledged, research slides into misconduct. Researchers state that “We believe that critics are right to condemn the production of ghostwritten journal articles, a practice we believe to be unethical and dangerous” and while collaboration itself is not the problem, “the problem is the specific ways in which these collaborations are disguised, manipulated, and used as tools for marketing drugs” ( Moffatt & Elliott, 2007 ).

Studies have shown that ghostwriting and guest authorship are prevalent within research. A study published in Nature stated that 10.0% of participating scientists engaged in “inappropriately assigning authorship credit”; mid-career scientists’ numbers are even more troubling, with a 12.3% admission rate ( Martinson, Anderson, and de Vries, 2005 ). A more recent 2011 study found that “the prevalence of articles with honorary and ghost authors across three peer-reviewed journals was 14.3% and 0.9%, respectively” ( Dotson & Slaughter, 2011 ). And a 2002 study of Cochrane reviews revealed that an astounding 39% of articles had “honorary” authorship and 9% had “ghost authors” ( Mowatt, et al., 2002 ).

The above numbers may vary, but establish that ghostwriting is happening due to myriad pressure points.

Ghostwriting can be perceived as a way to increase economic opportunities. For medical writers employed by industry, it is a career opportunity. For academic researchers, collaboration with industry may be correlated to prestige and grant support. And “for industry sponsors, these practices are part of global publication strategies for product promotion,” by developing relationships with academics ( Bosch & Ross, 2012 ).

The nature of research, too, can lead to ambiguity. Collaboration is a core component of good citizenship within academia. Funding, too, is more often than not tied to related industries. But these working relationships can often blur boundaries.

Propagating a perception of collaboration has encouraged the practice of multiple authors on research articles. By adding co-authors to a paper, particularly names of more established academics, researchers provide more esteem to their work and increase their chances of being published in more prestigious journals and gaining a wider audience. In fact, “Part of the problem is that good names give papers credibility. A colleague once told me that in his country it was more important to know the authors than the methods of a research paper, as some professors lent their names to almost anything if they were well paid. I have seen single-authored meta-analyses on drugs presenting sophisticated analyses that went far beyond the capability of the author, without a word about who did the analyses (and presumably even wrote the paper). Similarly, many drug reviews are unlikely to have been written by the authors, as these professors probably have more important things to do than writing book-length drug reviews in sponsored supplements or peripheral journals that few would ever read and that have no impact factor,” according to 2009 research ( Gøtzsche, et al., 2009 ).

Such “honorary” or “guest” authorship has been linked to ghostwriting; academic dishonesty is a slippery slope.

Research supports the slippery slope theory. “It is this culture,” states 2010 research, “that pharmaceutical companies have tapped into, rather than inventing a new type of author. But by flattering academics into being guest authors, they have created, and then filled, a need for ghost authors to actually write the papers. The academics accepting the apparent honor of authorship thus provide cover – as accomplices or as dupes – for manipulative marketing practices” ( Barbour, 2010 ).

Finally, ghostwriting is a growing practice because it is often viewed as a slight, rather than as uncontested research misconduct. (Plagiarism, on the other hand, is an uncontested ethical failing). So in the face of economic and career rewards, the incentives to engage in ghostwriting outweighs the low risk of discipline.

When authors collaborate with industry and do not reveal this collaboration in clear ways, research loses integrity and thus erodes trust.

Transparency is a key component to research integrity. Knowing exactly who is writing the article and making clear any bias or influence is critical to accurate findings and research conclusions. According to medical writer Langdon-Neuner, “Articles ghost-written by medical writers engaged by pharmaceutical companies who have a vested interest in the content have caused concern after scandals revealed misleading content in some articles” ( Langdon-Neuner, 2008 )

Advertisements carry the name of the manufacturer whereas ghost-written articles do not reveal affiliation. Confusing the two results in medical decisions made by doctors and policy makers that affect health.

Scientific communication and scientific objectivity is a clear line that delineates research from marketing. This line must be upheld, according to Barton & Elliott, who state, “One approach to scientific objectivity holds that science is objective because of its procedures. According to this view, the foundation of scientific objectivity rests in the way scientists communicate and contest results. Helen Longino (2001) argues that scientific communities are objective insofar as their communication procedures are open and contestable. But ghostwritten papers conceal the interests of authors and sponsors in a way that makes it difficult to assess and contest the scientific data, which undermines the objectivity of science itself” (Moffatt & Elliott, 2007, p. 27 ).

Bosch and Ross go even further in saying that “ghostwriting and guest authorship are acts of research misconduct and deserve such widespread indignation because they entail maintaining secrecy, falsifying credentials, and fabricating the attribution of writing to another, representing an intentional and significant departure from accepted practices within the research community” ( Bosch & Ross, 2012 ).

When practitioners and policy makers make decisions for others based on research, that research needs to be transparent and accurate. The consequences of ghostwriting are widespread; by undermining the integrity of research, it removes critical data that influences how that data will then be used, whether it be policy decisions or a basis for further research.

First and foremost, raising awareness is the first step in preventing ghostwriting from occurring in research articles. #Pleasedontstealmywork in Denmark, for instance, documents instances of ghostwriting in order to make clear the prevalence of ghostwriting. When unknowing researchers understand that ghostwriting is a form of misconduct, they are dissuaded from engaging in dishonesty. And when those who knowingly engage in ghostwriting are under the spotlight, they are less likely to engage in research misconduct.

Journals can take part by requiring contributorship statements for publication . Additionally, they can ask authors to make clear any written contributions by private industry. It is not the participation with industry that makes ghostwriting unethical but the lack of transparency with partnerships. Acknowledging medical writers can clarify conflicts of interest–and make their contribution legitimate ( Yadav & Rawal, 2018 ).

From the initial steps of awareness and journal participation, institutional involvement helps enforce a culture of academic integrity around research. Encouraging universities to define ghostwriting as research misconduct is a way to impress the importance of authorship. Other institutional-level support involves forming a standing committee or task force to sanction ghostwriting ( Bosch & Ross, 2012 ).

Some suggestions are punitive, and go as far as making it standard practice that ghostwriters and guest authors be named as defendants in litigation against the pharmaceutical industry, per Moffatt and Elliott ( Moffatt & Elliott, 2007, p. 29 ). Certainly, this would be a deterrent. The lack of disciplinary measures to date has contributed to widespread ghostwriting. Plagiarism results in retractions and negative reputation; the same must happen when it comes to ghostwriting.

As with all academic integrity issues, we hope it doesn’t come to punishment and that such breaches are avoided through education. We hope that spotlighting ghostwriting helps spare unknowing participants of misconduct.

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Integrity of Scientific Research pp 427–435 Cite as

Understanding Ghostwriting and Ghost Authorship As Problems of Research Integrity

  • Lisa DeTora 3  
  • First Online: 14 October 2022

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Ghostwriting is a serious problem of research integrity; however, its true impact remains unclear, and little concrete advice is available on how to avoid it. Ongoing discussions and engagement are needed by all authors and contributors to research publications. Efforts made by professional groups to ensure authorship transparency with an aim of ending ghost authorship and ghostwriting are presented. Attention to publication planning and execution is necessary to ensure that ghostwriting is eliminated, and research integrity is protected, especially in the context of large studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry.

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DeTora, L. (2022). Understanding Ghostwriting and Ghost Authorship As Problems of Research Integrity. In: Faintuch, J., Faintuch, S. (eds) Integrity of Scientific Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99680-2_43

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Ghostwriting: The Dirty Little Secret of Medical Publishing That Just Got Bigger

* E-mail: [email protected]

  • The PLoS Medicine Editors

PLOS

Published: September 8, 2009

  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000156
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Citation: The PLoS Medicine Editors (2009) Ghostwriting: The Dirty Little Secret of Medical Publishing That Just Got Bigger. PLoS Med 6(9): e1000156. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000156

Copyright: © 2009 The PLoS Medicine Editors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The authors are each paid a salary by the Public Library of Science, and they wrote this editorial during their salaried time.

Competing interests: The authors' individual competing interests are at http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/editorsInterests.action . PLoS is funded partly through manuscript publication charges, but the PLoS Medicine Editors are paid a fixed salary (their salary is not linked to the number of papers published in the journal).

Provenance: Written by editorial staff; not externally peer reviewed

If you are an editor, author, reviewer, or reader of medical journals, or if you depend on your doctor or health care provider getting unbiased information from medical journals, then the 1,500 documents now hosted on the PLoS Medicine Web site [1] should make you very concerned and angry. Because, quite simply, the story told in these documents amounts to one of the most compelling expositions ever seen of the systematic manipulation and abuse of scholarly publishing by the pharmaceutical industry and its commercial partners in their attempt to influence the health care decisions of physicians and the general public.

Here's just one sample thread [2] that gives an idea of the topsy-turvy world invented by the pharmaceutical and medical writing companies involved. While readers expect and assume that the named academic authors on a paper carried out the piece of work and then wrote up their article or review informed by their professional qualifications and expertise, instead we see a prime example of “ghostwriting”: a writing company was commissioned to produce a manuscript on a piece of research to fit the drug company's needs and then a person was identified to be the “author”:

An email from a writer employed by the medical writing company, DesignWrite, to employees of Wyeth, the company that performed the study, and Parthenon (another medical writing company) on November 10, 2003 concerning manuscripts on Totelle (a brand of hormone replacement therapy manufactured by Wyeth) tells the story concisely. “Thanks to all who have reviewed and approved the manuscripts… I have received no word on authors for the Totelle 2 mg bone manuscript P3(2), and need input on this matter before this manuscript can move forwards. ” [our emphasis added]

PLoS Medicine became involved in this particular ghostwriting story when we intervened in an ongoing court case [1] in which women were suing Wyeth, the manufacturers of Prempro, a hormone replacement therapy. During the discovery process for this case, one of the lawyers representing injured women in the litigation, Jim Szaller of Cleveland, Ohio, became aware of many documents that laid out in detail the company's (mostly successful) attempts to publish papers written by unacknowledged professional medical writers in which the message, tone, and content had been determined by the company but the paper was subsequently nominally “authored” by respected academics—in sum a coordinated and carefully monitored campaign of ghostwriting. Our interest was not in the specific drugs, but in the issue of ghostwriting itself, a topic we have long been interested in and published on [3] – [6] The intervention, presented by lawyers from public interest law firm Public Justice ( http://www.publicjustice.net ), and a similar one from the New York Times , was successful. On July 24, 2009, US District Judge William R. Wilson, Jr., in Little Rock, Arkansas, granted the Motions of the Interveners, and the similar Motion of the lawyers representing the women, to make the discovery materials public as of July 31.

This is not the place to review everything written on this topic. Others have written about ghostwriting campaigns concerning single drugs that have led to catastrophic health effects [7] , and how even research papers and clinical trials are affected by ghost authors [7] , [8] . What's clear is that ghostwriting can no longer be considered one of the “dirty little secrets” of medical publishing that nothing can be done about. While editors, medical schools, and universities have turned a blind eye to, or at the least failed to tackle head-on the pervasive presence of ghostwriting, drug companies and medical education and communication companies have built a vast and profitable ghostwriting industry. Recruitment of academic “authors” appears, within some academic circles, to have come to be considered acceptable, and marketing campaigns are no longer orchestrated around paid display advertisements but instead center on “evidence” provided by seemingly respectable academic review articles, original research articles, and even reports of clinical trials. What, a cynical reader might ask, can I truly trust as being unbiased? The answer is that, sadly, for some or even many journal articles, we just don't know.

So what can be done? The documents that have been made available are a substantial step forward in advancing knowledge of this practice and explaining the mechanics of how ghostwriting campaigns are organized, and will add to the evidence base. By making them easily and openly accessible we hope that others will quickly delve into the documents and analyze them in detail (we have yet not done so in the interest of speed in making them publicly available). But we also hope that the papers not only will become the subject of academic scrutiny but will help to guide the way to identifying reforms that will eventually stamp ghostwriting out. In an environment in which drug companies are beholden to their shareholders, and the drive for profit takes center stage, it is naïve to think that companies will put their own houses in order.

Over the past several years some journals and editors' organizations [9] , [10] , and even some individual medical writers [11] , have pursued what might be called a war of attrition against the practice by requiring contributorship statements for authors and publishing them, insisting on the naming of all who were involved in writing, requiring detailed competing interest statements, and detailing and publishing the provenance of non-research articles. Editors' bodies such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) expressly define criteria for authorship in biomedical publications [12] , and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) developed a specific policy on ghostwriting [10] initiated by commercial companies that calls the practice dishonest, unacceptable, and sanctionable. But it seems that these tactics are simply not enough to prevent ghostwriting, and are being sidestepped by those involved. Although medical writers can and do have a legitimate place in assisting in the preparation of manuscripts (and, of course, academics and pharmaceutical companies can have legitimate and appropriate relations, and not all papers in this archive will have been written by ghost authors), attempting to hide the presence of ghostwriters or the involvement of writers beyond technical support (such as copyediting) is unacceptable. We'd argue, therefore, that all involved must adopt a much tougher approach of complete nontolerance to practices that aim to conceal authors or where the involvement of medical writers goes beyond technical support.

What might this mean in practice for journals? Primarily, it would mean a sea change in the thinking and behavior of editors, who should create—and be prepared to enforce—journal policies clarifying that involvement with ghostwriting is a serious and punishable breach of publication ethics. Of course, prevention is key: possible measures could include requiring statements upon submission from academic authors about involvements by any company whose products are mentioned (positively or negatively, directly or indirectly) in the commissioning of a third party to provide editorial assistance, manuscript preparation, or submission of the paper.

But journal polices should also include enforceable sanctions. For example, if nothing is declared on submission but inappropriate involvement of a medical writer subsequently comes to light, any papers where this breach is substantiated should be immediately retracted and those authors found to have not declared such interest should be banned from any subsequent publication in the journal and their misconduct reported to their institutions.

In the case of the documents deposited here, a good start, and a signal of the seriousness of journals' intent, would be the formal retraction of all the papers mentioned in which ghostwriting has been conclusively shown. Institutions whose academics are shown to be involved should investigate as a matter of urgency.

It's time to get serious about tackling ghostwriting. As has been shown in the documents released after the Vioxx scandal [7] , this practice can result in lasting injury and even deaths as a result of prescribers and patients being misinformed about risks. Without action, the practice will undoubtedly continue. How did we get to the point that falsifying the medical literature is acceptable? How did an industry whose products have contributed to astounding advances in global health over the past several decades come to accept such practices as the norm? Whatever the reasons, as the pipeline for new drugs dries up and companies increasingly scramble for an ever-diminishing proportion of the market in “me-too” drugs, the medical publishing and pharmaceutical industries and the medical academic community have become locked into a cycle of mutual dependency, in which truth and a lack of bias have come to be seen as optional extras. Medical journal editors need to decide whether they want to roll over and just join the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies. Authors who put their names to such papers need to consider whether doing so is more important than having a medical literature that can be believed in. Politicians need to consider the harm done by an environment that incites companies into insane races for profit rather than for medical need. And companies need to consider whether the arms race they have started will in the end benefit anyone. After all, even drug company employees get sick; do they trust ghost authors?

Author Contributions

Wrote the first draft: VB. Contributed to writing of the paper: JC, SJ, LP, EV, GY.

  • 1. http://www.plosmedicine.org/static/ghostwriting.action .
  • 2. Lea A (2003) Totelle manuscripts sign-off and review [E-mail]. Available: http://www.plos.org/ghostwriting/Exhibits2/CONSG204-014513.TIF . Accessed 19 August 2009.
  • View Article
  • Google Scholar
  • 10. WAME (2005) Ghost writing initiated by commercial companies. Available: http://www.wame.org/resources/policies#ghost . Accessed 19 August 2009.
  • 11. Wager E, Field EA, Grossman L (2003) Good publication practice for pharmaceutical companies. Curr Med Res Opin 19: 149–154. Available: http://basic1.easily.co.uk/03100E/00605D/GPP.pdf . Accessed 19 August 2009.
  • 12. ICMJE (2008) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication: Byline authors. Available: http://www.icmje.org/#author . Accessed 19 August 2009.
  • Original article
  • Open access
  • Published: 01 July 2016

A close encounter with ghost-writers: an initial exploration study on background, strategies and attitudes of independent essay providers

  • Shiva Sivasubramaniam   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7014-5000 1 ,
  • Kalliopi Kostelidou 1 &
  • Sharavan Ramachandran 1  

International Journal for Educational Integrity volume  12 , Article number:  1 ( 2016 ) Cite this article

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Academic dishonesty presents in different forms, including fabrication of data, falsifying references, multiple submissions, collusion, and sabotage, with two forms haunting academia, namely plagiarism and contract cheating or ghost writing. These latter forms have received considerable attention and have been subjects for research. This interview-based study provides some further insight into the problem of ghost writing through presenting the attitudes, justifications and networking practices of some hired ‘ghost-writers’ from a developing country and discusses the depth of this emerging threat to the academic community.

Initially, through simple internet searches using specific keywords, an array of professional advertisements selling contract writing services were identified. Some of these promotional advertisements were found in Facebook® posts, and/or Twitter® feeds. The second part of this study presents a summary of findings from interviews of a group of ghost-writers including their background, attitude and justifications for setting up this new business. The study identifies several high calibre post-graduates who have come to understand the Western (European/North American/Australian) ways of scientific writing and have produced a network of ‘consultancy’ services. Although the birth of their business was ad-hoc, they have established a good network and are now able to share projects and practices. Many of them offer services to home and foreign students with varied levels of customer focus. Some of them are even using Turnitin © software to identify text matching issues. This study suggests that these paper mills have widely been subscribed to by students. The article finally discusses wider issues arising from these interviews and proposes some ways of tackling this new threat to academia.

Introduction

Academic dishonesty can present in a variety of forms, including data fabrication, falsifying references, multiple submissions, collusion and sabotage. Two common forms of academic dishonesty which haunt academia are plagiarism and ghost writing or contract cheating. The term ‘contract cheating’ was coined by Clarke and Lancaster, when they used IT–based tools to track bids by students trying to outsource computer work on the internet (Clarke and Lancaster 2006 ). In contrast ‘ghost writing’, has several distinct meanings, depending on the level of involvement of the ghost-writer (POGO 2011 ; Bosch and Ross 2012 ). Some examples, such as autobiographies that are mostly written collaboratively by a named author and ghost-writer, are considered ethically acceptable providing the use of the ghost--writer is properly acknowledged. In contrast, ‘contract cheating’ in which the student/academic is using/paying ghost-writers to complete parts of or entire projects without any inputs of their own, or proper acknowledgement is defined as academic dishonesty. Dedicated businesses such as essay mills/paper mills or writing services, as they are often presented, are being set up to serve these customers.

Since many Western (see methodology for definition) universities have incorporated text-matching software checks as a part of the submission process, plagiarism has been somewhat deterred, if not always detected (Sivasubramaniam 2013 ). However, there is less focus on addressing the issue of ghost writing or buying essays from paper mills (Molinari 2014 ). As Rothschild ( 2011 ) argued, although ghost writing is technically plagiarism under strict definition, many institutions fail to address it as a problem. Based on personal discussions with some 30 academics in the Bioscience field, approximately 60 % believe that a professionally ghost written article can easily be identified either by text matching detection software, by its style or use of citation. They also think that essays from most paper mills are too expensive for undergraduates to buy, since they are only going to contribute a percentage to their final degree. The former belief is based on assumption that ghost-writers do not spend much time researching the subject and therefore may use internet-based articles, or may sell basically the same essay, or parts of it, more than once. However in reality, it is impossible to detect an article carefully ghost written by an expert just by using text matching software. The second assumption is based on the idea that ghost-writers are professional experts who would charge high fees that are unaffordable by most students. However, it is questionable whether all ghost-writers are professionals.

Due to internationalisation of education, availability of web resources coupled with the spread/penetration of social media and their broad use by the young generation have together invalidated these assumptions.

So what is the connection between internationalisation, social media and ghost writing? Many students with postgraduate qualifications from Western Universities are returning to their native countries to face a grim future as regards employment. Having studied internationalised curricula and established global links via social media, some of these students can and do start new ghost writing services. These services are easily accessible, economical, and above all, provide realistic essays that resemble an original student essay which may be precise, but include common student mistakes.

This article first captures the extent of internet presence of ghost writing advertisements and then investigates the attitudes and justifications of a group of hired ‘ghost-writers’ from a developing country, as well as their working and networking practices, to examine the depth of this emerging treat to the academic community.

Methodology

Terms used in this work.

For the purposes of this work, terms used are defined as follows: ‘ghost-writer’ the person who authors essays, books, articles, theses which are credited to another person. For the present work, ‘ghost writing’ is used to describe the act of ghost writing, namely hiring a ghost-writer to author an academic assignment. Synonymous terms used in this paper are: contract-cheating, marketing of writing services, paper mills and essay mills. Although the actual definition of these terms may vary, the resulting phenomenon is the same, i.e. provision of an authored work, for a fee. ‘Western’ is used in the text to refer to Anglophone universities from Europe (any country), Northern America (USA and Canada), or Australia/New Zealand. ‘Commercial Essay Providers’ and ‘Amateur Writers’ are used according to their respective establishments. The former is used to depict a network of well-established writers;the latter to describe non-professional independent writers.

Concept of this work – online search

The idea of carrying out this exploratory study was initiated in 2013 after reading a Facebook © post (advertisement) about ‘high quality help for writing assignments’. Following this, a Google® (UK-Version 49.0.2623.112 m) search was immediately carried out using words linked to the term ‘ghost-writers’ such as ‘ghost writing’; ‘how to ghost write’; ‘detecting ghost writing’, to capture the extent of popularity/presence of these words within the online community. A similar search was performed in April 2016 using other popular terms such as ‘contract cheating’ and ‘professional writing service’. In 2013, the authors looked into social media such as Facebook © , Twitter®, and What’s App® to identify 25 posts/advertisements for ‘academic writing services’. These writers were randomly selected and contacted through phone calls, when authors explained the purpose of the study. Out of the 25, only ten agreed to participate so they were sent an invitation, with more details. All responders were given details of the purpose of this study, its mode of investigation and ethical aspects involved, including maintaining confidentiality. The study included interviews with the ten ghost-writers/organisations. Representing different subject areas but mainly Biosciences, they were all educated in Western countries and had since returned to their country of origin. Because these interviews were conducted in a different country from that of the author’s institution, ethical issues were covered by conducting them under UNESCO’s ‘Norms of Journalistic Conduct’ as described within the country in which these interviews were carried out. For reasons of confidentiality, this file cannot be presented, as it would expose the country where the interviewed ghost-writers were based. As almost all of the interviewees considered their work as a ‘professional writing service’ or ‘project’, the term ‘ghost writing’ was avoided in interviews. Interviews were held face-to-face with a duration of approximately fifteen minutes or by email. Comments and answers by the interviewees were recorded. These notes were subsequently re-read and key points selected to be reproduced in this text and commented upon. All interviews took place between March and to December 2013.

The purpose of these interviews was to assess (a) the individual background/circumstances for starting or joining this service (b) its popularity (c) its reliability/affordability and (d) whether they considered their service as academic dishonesty. Some examples of questions, taken from each category are given in the Appendix . While these questions were posed to the interviewees, specific answers were not always received and data presented only refer to the answers received.

Voluntary contributions of few ghost written articles were also collected to check their authenticity using the text matching software Turnitin® - Moodle Direct Version 2.2.1.

Online searches

General online searches were carried out to capture the numbers of hits on ghost writing in Google® to obtain an idea of the extent and popularity of this phenomenon. Searches were carried out in 2013 when this work started and repeated in 2016. Initially only the term ghost writing was used as a search keyword, while in the most recent search (2016) we also included ‘contract cheating’. The terms used are shown in Table  1 . As search keywords, phrases containing either neutral or positive connotations were included e.g. ‘how to ghost write’, ‘definition of contract cheating’, or negative ones such as ‘problem of ghost writing’, ‘detecting ghost writing’, ‘contract cheating in Higher Education’. The overall search data is summarised in Table  1 .

As can be seen in Table  1 , Google® searches revealed that ghost writing is extensively publicised online under different terms, for instance ghost writing, writing services etc. Interestingly in 2013 when this study began and with the use of the term ‘ghost writing’, phrases with ‘encouraging’ connotations, such as ‘how to ghost write’ or ‘ghost writing’ achieved a high number of hits, while corresponding ones with deterring connotations, as ‘detecting ghost writing’ or ‘problem with ghost writing’ had fewer hits. The most recent search in April 2016, however, revealed a few interesting points. First, the phrase ‘problem of ghost writing’ has increased its number of hits by 458 % (Table  1 , row 2). Also the number of hits for ‘ghost writing’ has risen by an impressive 1499 % (Table  1 , row 1). This trend not only reflects the increasing penetration and spreading of ghost writing but also increased awareness of this service. Interestingly, all the other entries, such as definition of ghost writing’, ‘how to ghost write’ ‘ghost writing in higher education’ and also ‘detecting ghost writing’ have been markedly reduced in number of hits [−21 % for ‘how to detect ghost writing’;−92 % for ‘how to ghost write’]. We would like to believe that these observations could be due to a universal tendency to use ‘contract cheating’ instead of ‘ghost-writer’.

A Google Scholar® search using the entire phrase ‘contract cheating’ which was performed on 15 April 2016 and excluded patents and citations, retrieved 197 articles. A large proportion of these were by Clarke and Lancaster. This was expected as these authors have presented pioneer work in this subject since 2006 and have since published several manuscripts (Clarke and Lancaster 2007 , 2009 , 2012 ). Simply changing the search term into ‘ghost writing’, but maintaining the exact search criteria retrieved 160 entries, mostly linked with ghost writing in the medical sector and industry-sponsored ghost writing on clinical trials.

Social media searches

Social media searches have revealed several small to medium size advertisements, blogs and chatting strings concerning these ‘writing services’. They were embedded as tweets, or Facebook® entries, which are linked to a home page. Some example screen shots are given in Fig.  1 .

Example advertisements from common social media websites

These advertisements are taken as screen-shots from social media and anonymised. Five of the anonymised advertisements are from ghost-writers 3, 4 and 5, 7 and 8, who were later interviewed.

Almost all of the examples in Fig.  1 are openly offering ‘writing help’ and appear to be addressing university students, both undergraduate and post-graduate. At least one writer has managed to post his advertisement on the common student Facebook® pages of a university. It is also interesting to note some are assuring, or claiming, that essays written by them would have less than 6 % Turnitin® similarity matches (white arrow in Fig.  1 , top left advertisement). This shows that these advertisers are fully aware of the use of text matching software in higher education (see section  Qualitative data obtained from Interviews ). Some offer discounts of up to 15 %, giving gift coupon codes (white arrow-head in Fig.  1 , bottom right advertisement). Others offer help with thesis write ups, even at PhD level.

Qualitative data obtained from Interviews

A total of twenty five ghost-writers were approached and ten (40 %) consented to be interviewed following a confidentiality agreement that their personal identification, location, age and sex not be disclosed. Their educational profiles are shown in Table  2 . Their qualifications are significant, with 90 % having a post-graduate Master’s degree and onea doctorate from Western Universities.

Reasons for ghost writing

Most of these services were started by students who returned to their home country after finishing post-graduate studies abroad. As a result of lack of employment in their field in their own country, some began as solos; others formed a consortium of friends from different fields of study. At least one interviewee claimed that s/he never intended to start this as a business model but continued after realising his/her first two assignments were highly successful. All of those interviewed felt that there was a high demand for ‘writers’. Commercial Essay Provider 1 held a doctorate in bioinformatics and had worked as a lecturer for a short period. During this time, s/he developed contacts with student communities. As for the incentive or reasons for starting this, s/he replied:

‘It was my own effort to start this service to our students studying overseas. I had utilized my acquired analytical and vocabulary skills to address the needs of our students.’

Similar answers were obtained from Amateur Writers 7 and 8.

Amateur Writer 4 stated:

‘One of my friends gives me projects to complete but I am planning to advertise through social networking sites.’

Although it appears these ‘writers’ started ad-hoc (mainly Commercial Essay Provider 1, 2, 9, and 10) they established a good network and were able to share projects and practices. Half of those interviewed advertise only in the social media as posts/tweets, not as advertisements. In contrast, others feel that advertising does not have an impact on their business and it is a waste of money.

Commercial Essay Provider 3 said:

‘Advertising through main internet servers does not have any impact in our promotion; also Google © have banned promotions for such report writing services.’

In their opinion (Commercial Provider 3), media can be used as a bridge for creating awareness and can also provide an opportunity to monitor market status. Eighty percent of the ghost-writers interviewed claimed they never used Google® for advertising. It should be noted that the initial Google® searches did reveal several ghost writing advertisements, many of which looked as if they came from professional Western organisations. There were also claims in Google® blogs by reformed ghost-writers that many Western paper mills outsourced their work to developing countries (Tamlyn, 2009 ). However none of the ghost-writers interviewed in this investigation seem to acquire ‘projects’ via this route. Their main forms of advertising are either through social media or personal contacts/networking. Considering claims from Tamlyn’s ( 2009 ) and other similar blogs ( Sydney media service ; Raven’s Blog 2013 ) and comparing responses from this study, it is clear that there might be three groups of online based ghost writing services: (a) established Western country-based providers, (b) Western country-based providers who outsource their contracts and (c) those based and run by former students of Western education who are now based in their native, non-Western countries. From the replies received, participants of this study fall into the third group. As stated above, their personalised approach via Facebook © or through contacts might have improved their business. When interviewed many of them said that their ‘service’ is valued by students.

Amateur Writer 4 who started his service recently, stated:

‘I mainly get projects through my references and contacts. Perhaps, my outstanding performances in various projects speak a lot, which I feel (is) better than commercial advertising’

However, Writer 4 did not deny that social media played a part in their ‘popularity’. In fact, everyone agreed that the probability of students going to them via referrals and contacts by word of mouth/social media was higher than through advertising. The interviews also revealed that these writers are highly successful. One consortium of writers proudly claimed (Commercial Essay Provider 5):

‘The frequency of our writing is constant and we get projects more frequently by any other means; so, our work and our service will fetch us further projects.’

Another writer (Amateur Writer 6) said:

‘It depends upon the needs of the students and university. As I am handling the services to all degree students, irrespective of their level of study, it will be busy all year around. For international dissertation services, it will be very busy during the months of June and January.’

Due to this high demand, this writer is now recruiting and training MSc/PhD holders from his own country. Seven writers admitted they have constant demand from both overseas and home students, the former being defined as those studying in overseas countries. As for expertise in a given subject, they share projects by networking, to ensure the is handled by an expert in subject’s essay. For example, if a bioscience project is acquired by a provider with social science expertise, they would refer this on to an individual with bioscience specialism and vice versa.

Reliability

With respect to the reliability of their service, all interviewees had a clear understanding of academic writing and plagiarism avoidance. In fact some of them even use text matching detection software to reduce the percentage matches as they perfect their essays. An example email from a senior writer to their apprentice (Commercial Provider 3), highlighting the text matching issue with instructions to rephrase the essay and screen shots of a Turnitin © report, is given in Fig.  2 .

Example communication between ghost-writers regarding a Turnitin© report

An example email correspondence between writers within Commercial Essay Provider 3. Personal identifiers such as names, email addresses are removed as requested by the interviewee.

After showing this example, the provider (Commercial Essay Provider 3) quoted:

‘We train them (the apprentice) to meet the international standards and requirements. By doing this, we can deliver plagiarism-free services to our international clients and customers.’

The same provider admitted that they clearly advise students how to address academic misconduct investigations. They are clever enough to use the student’s (customer) name and their respective university registration numbers for Turnitin © checks, so if detected, the student can claim they had checked the assignment for accuracy before submission.

Considering the seriousness of the claim that some ghost-writers are using Turnitin® to reduce the percentage of text matches, the authors requested some of their (ghost-writers’) past ‘projects’ to validate this claim. All but one, including those who claimed to be using Turnitin®, refused to provide any essays. The single ghost-writer who agreed was Commercial Essay Provider number 2, who provided four pieces of his/her work, two each for in-country customers and for students in Western universities. These four essays were checked for authenticity using Turnitin® (Moodle Direct version 2.2.1) and the percentage matches are highlighted in Fig.  3 . The right hand panels, which have a high similarity index with other published sources, were apparently written for in-country customers. In contrast, the left hand panels with low similarity index were produced for students studying in Western countries.

Percentages matches of example articles supplied by the ghost-writers

Screen shots of Turnitin® reports on articles that are claimed to be written for international (panels A and C) and in-country students (panels B and D) are given on the left and right respectively. The percentage matches are 5 and 8 % for panels A and C respectively and 75 and 54 % for panels B and D respectively. Percentages are circled on the top right part of each panel.

It is interesting to note that within the country where this study was conducted, the number of Universities/Higher education institutions which actually make use of any form of text matching services or programmes to check for academic dishonesty is below 1 % (the data was arbitrarily collected from 100 university websites in that country). A potentially low level of detection may have been realised by these writers, who may be offering widely copied material to in-country students. Although the sample size is too limited to give a meaningful conclusion, this data points to a customer-focussed service being offered by these ghost-writers. They may be trying to offer customised essays to students in Western countries where academic honesty is properly checked, whilst for their in-country customers producing essays that just address learning outcomes by copying, or ‘ patch-working ’. Patch working is mixing and matching sections of other essays into a new one, rather than carefully reading and then paraphrasing content of the sources to create an original piece of work. It is interesting to note, that the author (Commercial Essay Provider 2) who supplied these essays, when confronted with this evidence denied the accusation that ghost-writers may be offering a two-tier customer service and claimed it was merely coincidental. Since this investigation only focussed on ghost-writing practices, their popularity and justifications, investigating this suspected two-tier service which is based on minimal evidence is beyond the scope of this study.

When prompted with the question about the morality of performing this service, the writers’ argument was that the process of ‘writing’ usually involves the customer (student). They maintained their service is merely carried out in the form of collaboration with the customer, with whom they have a constant dialogue, making the student read their drafts and comments so that understand the essay and fulfil its learning outcomes. In other words they are claiming their role is as ‘editors’ rather than ‘writers’. The following excerpt given by one of the ghost writing consortia (Commercial Essay Provider 5) summarises the attitude of these writers and clearly shows they know students’ weaknesses:

‘Although the students from this (anonymised) country are highly focussed on knowledge, they lag far behind when it comes to execution. This will mask their career growth. The main reason is that, they are not taught the importance of writing at preliminary levels. They are not aware of plagiarism. This is mainly due to the design of our (anonymised) educational system. Consequently, their research is not recognised in the international platform. We (the writers) are simply helping them to get recognised.’

Similar attitudes were observed in the answers of Commercial Providers 9 and 10. The writers understood the differences in expectations between Western and non-Western assessments and use these differences to enhance their business. They are committed to their customers, promise to write better essays, and avoid plagiarism. One writer (Commercial Essay Provider 2) even accused the university system and its assessment practices by quoting:

‘The lack of support from the university tutors with their (students) course work is the main reason for students to seek the assistance from us.’

Affordability

The authors of this manuscript have found that these writing services are substantially cheaper than paper mills located in Europe, US or Australia, especially for an under/post-graduate who could afford to pay international tuition fees of the UK or USA. The charging practices differ from writer to writer. One (Commercial Essay Provider 3) claimed s/he charged the equivalent of 3 to 5 UK pence per word with a minimum charge of £100. This is important evidence that contradicts the common academic belief that ‘ students cannot afford to buy an essay from an essay-mill ’. The charges of the interviewed ghost-writers depend on the complexity of the project, from £150 for an undergraduate-level assignment to £1000 for a PhD thesis. Although some claimed they even wrote PhD theses, the authors were unable to gather any evidence for this.

Summary of findings and concluding remarks

Unlike plagiarism, there are no statistical data showing the extent of ghost writing amongst academics and students. This is justified by the difficulty in properly detecting these practices and possibly a general academic belief that ghost writing is not prevalent amongst university students. There is considerable published work on the subject of ghost writing/contract cheating (Clarke and Lancaster 2006 , 2012 ) but our work first aimed to explore the online ‘presence’ of ghost-writers and secondly to capture their styles and attitudes towards their business, as well as shedding some light on their operative ways and networking practices.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work aiming to present collective opinions of a group of ghost-writers in an academic journal rather than a newspaper or blog. In this transformed world of communication, social networking plays a major part in discussing course-related matters amongst students of higher education (Roblyer et al. 2010 ; Connell 2009 ). Essay mills businesses have noticed the potential of these websites as an advertising platform (Todi 2008 ). The phenomenon of students using social networking sites to obtain educational support has already been described (Peluchette and Karl 2008 ; Roblyer et al. 2010 ), and the ghost-writers capitalize on this. They not only specifically yet discretely target large customer groups, but also twist its use to avoid creating a media outcry. Therefore, they endorse the strategy of posting for their ‘availability’ as a simple entry on the web, rather than tagging it as a proper advertisement. From our study, approximately 80 % realised that their services may not be legal and could be blocked by the service providers.

Unemployment, particularly for specialised graduates seems to serve as the incentive for these people to starting such ventures, clearly indicating that a coveted international education may not currently be suitable for their country of origin at least for the present time. As Teichler ( 2004 ) stated, internationalisation of education without addressing core competency requirements of a global market results in unemployment. The fact that these ghost-writers are relatively recent graduates (80 % of them graduated within the last 5 years) clearly proves Teichler’s point.

Another consequence of recent graduation is that these contract essay providers are accustomed to marking criteria, learning objectives and outcomes, and the overall styles required for assignments. In terms of originality, there are signs of a ‘two-tier’ service. One service is tailored to students in Western universities and includes the use of Turnitin © or similar programmes to detect/correct potential text matching issues. The second service is designed for in-country students and lacks any provision for plagiarism checks, as home universities lag behind in use of text matching software.

Regarding the question of ethics in academic writing, the writers’ arguments were somewhat varied. By showing evidence, some (at least 2) tried to prove customer involvement throughout the project and therefore argued it is not unethical or immoral. The rest justified their service as similar to English Language Editing (ELE) services offered by many journals. One of the ghost-writers (Amateur Writer 6) even pointed out that it has been a common practice by Western academics to hire grant writers, and questioned how their service is dissimilar to this. Quoting Fugh Berman’s ( 2005 ) manuscript about pharmaceutical industries using ghost written articles supporting the efficacy of new drug (before its release onto the market, (Commercial Provider 5) defended argument that ghost writing is a common and acceptable practice. They also questioned the authors ‘ why you (the authors) are only keen to investigate these practices in my country, instead of investigating the corporate ghost-writers of the West? ’

These findings may come as no surprise, but indicate that these interviewees have a clear understanding of their work. They know how to justify their existence as well as sustain and grow their business. As prices become affordable and business is growing, this new generation of ghost-writers is going to be a major challenge for the internationalised higher education system. Therefore it is necessary for institutions to focus and redesign their assessment strategies to remove the chances of ghost writing. A holistic approach, where the strategy of assessment by means of a written assignment as a ‘measure of learning’ is shifted to an approach that evaluate the ‘learning process’ through constant student engagement and input. Different levels of organisation are required from all involved stakeholders, including the students and the Government (Clarke and Lancaster 2007 , 2009 ). Academic tutors need to tailor their assessment methods so that the process, as well as the outcome are assessed. It is also possible to have a test linked to an assignment, for example testing an element of the product, or to introduce team work activities. The latter was successfully introduced by the first author in his own institution. Administrative and IT staff can also be involved to perform regular checks on student fora, University websites and discussion pages.

University management needs to put in place a clear code of conduct and policies to deal with all the aspects of ghost writing, from detection to penalties to the involved student. Policy making can also be requested at Government level, which could result in cancelling the VISA of an overseas student who is proven culpable.

Obviously, dealing with contract cheating is not easy, especially in today’s large departments and classes, but with the introduction of an array of measures and fostering of an altered perspective by students, ghost writing could be, at least to some extent, deterred.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr Christopher Terrell-Nield, Nottingham Trent University for his editorial help and constructive criticisms throughout this study. The authors also wish to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this manuscript.

The study was internally funded by the Nottingham Trent University.

Disclaimer statement

A part of this study was presented in the ‘Plagiarism across Europe and beyond 2015’ conference at Mendel University in Brno, Czech Republic June 10th-12th 2015. Therefore some findings were published as a proceeding manuscript from this conference.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

School of Science and Technology, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK

Shiva Sivasubramaniam, Kalliopi Kostelidou & Sharavan Ramachandran

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Correspondence to Shiva Sivasubramaniam .

Additional information

Competing interests.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Authors’ contributions

All authors contributed extensively to the work presented in this manuscript. SDS designed the research plan, organised the study and assisted in the analysis. SR carried out the survey and interviews; he also analysed the data and drafted the manuscript. KK has carried out the online based searches, addressed the issues pointed out by the reviewers and made the final draft. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Authors’ information

Shiva Sivasubramaniam (SDS) is principal lecturer and Subject lead for Pharmacology. He has been an active researcher in developing novel approaches in teaching biomedical sciences. His pedagogic research interests include (a) internationalisation; (b) Student centred teaching, (c) peer-assisted learning and (b) plagiarism deterrence. Working closely with the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and Plagiarism Advisory Services (PAS), he has addressed student education by enhancing academic writing and graduate attributes. This has resulted in several publications in HEA and PAS conferences. He has also been involved in developing several post-graduate courses to suit the needs of international students without affecting the experience of home/EU students. In addition he has developed innovative teaching techniques to educate under- and post-graduate students and plagiarism deterrence.

Kalliopi Kostelidou (KK) is a lecturer/sabbatical assistant for the corresponding author.

Professor of Biochemistry, Department of Life and Health Sciences, School of Sciences. Her research interests include microbiology and pedagogic development. She is currently working to develop distance learning modules at post-graduate level. She is also involved in corresponding author’s current research to develop methodologies to enhance student involvement.

Sharavan Ramachandran (SR) holds an MSc –Research degree in Bimolecular sciences from the Nottingham Trent University. He worked as a research assistant to SDS during this study. He is currently pursuing a PhD degree in molecular bioscience.

Appendix – some example questions asked during the interview

A. The Background (reasons for starting/joining)

What was the main reason for starting this service?

Were you confident that you had the experience and/or expertise to start this project?

When you started this project how many others were involved?

B. Popularity and accessibility

How many projects per month do you usually undertake?

How do you advertise? (Whether you advertise? or do students contact you?)

How do you network? Do you share expertise? If so, how do you allocate/share projects? Are staff well trained to meet the International Standards?

C. Reliability and affordability

What is your price range? And why do you think it is appropriate?

Who decides on price? You or the customer?

Do you think your price range is affordable by home/international students?

D. Views on academic dishonesty and plagiarism

Do you know about academic dishonesty? What is your view regarding plagiarism?

Do you think that your services contravene the code of practice in academic writing? If not, why?

Do you take steps to avoid plagiarism in your projects? If so, how?

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Sivasubramaniam, S., Kostelidou, K. & Ramachandran, S. A close encounter with ghost-writers: an initial exploration study on background, strategies and attitudes of independent essay providers. Int J Educ Integr 12 , 1 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-016-0007-9

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Published : 01 July 2016

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40979-016-0007-9

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5 Effective Ways to Avoid Ghostwriting for Busy Researchers

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“….. and what do you think about it?” asked one of the researchers on the review panel. Stumped by it, you had no clue what the question meant—was it related to the introduction? some citation in the introduction? You were clueless about it! You were prepared with questions related to aims and objectives, methodology, results, all the graphs, and discussion too! Of course, you used a ghostwriter to write your paper! Your silence speaks it all and the panel is waiting for your reply, it looks like they have concluded your lack of knowledge, on what might have appeared to be the basic foundation of your research paper .

And then, dejected, you accept the fact that you did not really write the paper. You opted for ghostwriting! Although the experiments in the laboratory were conducted by you and the data was generated and analyzed by you, the manuscript, the paper you published was written by a ghostwriter, who took no credit for it!

Table of Contents

What is Ghostwriting?

Ghostwriting is a practice wherein an individual makes a significant contribution to the manuscript and is yet not named as an author or a contributor. These writers are often found to work for medical communication agencies that carry out publishing of clinical trials studies. Thus, ghostwriting is common in journals that report large scale clinical trials and literature studies. Furthermore, many journals and editors allow professional medical writers to contribute to the papers. They do not list them as authors and acknowledge their role with remuneration.

However, scientific communication depends on trust and reliability on published literature i.e. to be able to believe what is read and trust the knowledge that is imparted. This is the biggest challenge in case of ghostwriting because the medical writers are not originally aware of the depth of the conducted research work.

What is the Role of a Ghostwriter in Research Publishing?

Research findings from various fields of study generate scientific data; it is on a large scale. This data is presented in a document format. In the field of research, writing original research and review papers is a challenging task. The notable medical writers ethically help researchers to convert their raw data into a research document.  Therefore, medical writing agencies or independent writers write regarding the products or drugs overlooking their adverse effects. Pharmaceutical companies fund many ghostwriters to create a manuscript which is published in a reputed journal under a well renowned scientist (who may or may not be allowed to incorporate changes).

There are medical writing agencies, such as Medical Education and Communications Company (MECC) or American Medical Writers Association (AMWA), that identify ghostwriting malpractices in the field of scientific literature. Although ghostwriting service proves helpful for busy researchers who are not able to cater to the substantial literature review . This service is a scientific misconduct. Academic research publication rarely detects ghostwriting.

Ghostwriting Service – A Scientific Misconduct

Part of publishing a paper relies primarily on journal and authors reputation. If researchers happen to use the ghostwriting service, due to time constraints, they could be charged with professional misconduct. Ghostwriters draft the article under the name of reputed authors to publish it in leading journal. While this practice is not considered illegal yet, it is as an unethical practice and soon will be tackled with rules to curtail ghostwriting in the field of research. Some researchers genuinely struggle to publish their scientific data, and with the current research race to ‘Publish or Perish’, the need to publish the study as early as possible is important. However, with the growing availability of application-based language assistance tools, writing articles has become an effective exercise.

Tools to Assist Research Article Writing

1. trinka ai.

Trinka is an AI-powered English grammar checker tool used to improve your writing as well as language enhancements. As a writing assistant tool, Trinka works well for all kinds of writing but performs much better on academic and technical texts compared to most other tools . It corrects contextual spelling mistakes and advanced grammar errors by providing real-time writing suggestions. The result is more concise and impactful  for professional and academic writing.

2. Enago Plagiarism Checker

Enago Plagiarism and AI Grammar Checker tool uses the advanced text similarity detection algorithms, in partnership with Turnitin, to check for plagiarism. It has the largest database on the internet with 91+ billion webpages as well as 82+ million scholarly articles. It delivers a comprehensive plagiarism report with plagiarism percentage score and color-coded system. You will understand how similar your paper is as compared to the published papers with the help of plagiarism percentage score. It performs plagiarism checkers out there. Another feature that sets this tool apart is –  it also checks your paper for grammar errors and gives writing improvement suggestions powered by AI. You can download the tracked changes of MS word document to review the suggestion.

Trello is a work management app. It tracks team projects, highlights tasks, and gives the details of its completion. Furthermore, it allows the user to list and schedule activities, provide deadlines and show progress percentage. The user can create multiple board for different assignments.

Collecting and analyzing literature for your research is of utmost importance. Scopus is a multidisciplinary citation database of peer-reviewed literature like, scientific journals, books, and conference proceedings. Research has become global and with interdisciplinary and collaborative researches on the go, it is essential to stay updated.

5. Mendeley

This tool manages references. Mendeley is a reference manager tool that helps researchers organize relevant references for their research paper. This tool helps organize your citations and research.   

Avoid Ghostwriting with the Help of Reviewing Services

Peer review service.

The peer review service handles some activities in the peer review process and puts best practices to research workflow. This service will help authors maintain and improve the outcome of their peer review process. This service suggests improvement in the manuscript based on the journal requirement and enhances the author, reviewer or editor experience. However, if you opt for ghostwriting service, you will have to share the references and data to the ghostwriter. He/she will not have any personal views on the journal in which you want to publish the article.

Proofreading & Formatting

There are many proofreading and formatting services that provide affordable and fast manuscript proofreading services which ease the publishing process .  Proofreading focuses on correcting the errors in writing and helps enhance the language of the manuscript and formatting brings in the uniformity and helps adhere to the guidelines issued by journals for the authors. A ghostwriter cannot vouch for a feature like this.

Artwork Editing

To meet the journal’s technical requirements, the artwork editors revise/format the artwork for consistency and accuracy.

Initially, these applications will appear to be a challenge and assigning the writing task to a ghostwriter might look like a better option. But these applications give user-friendly interface and you will eventually get familiar with these tools. However, some researchers might choose unethical practices, while many others are genuine researchers struggling to keep up their laboratory responsibilities with their writing targets!

There is a blurred line between the use and misuse of ghost authorship. However, the research fraternity will see, how to some extent ghostwriting is distorting the scientific literature. It won’t be long before authors will be penalized for unethical practices and scientific misconduct. And the best way to avoid ghostwriting is to use the tools available for writing and organizing scientific research.

Tell us if you have used any of these tools or any other tools for writing your reviews or research papers? Did you like it? Would you recommend it to others? Write to us or leave a comment below!

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Opinion: Exorcising Ghostwriting from Peer Review

Training young scientists to review submitted manuscripts should be an academic exercise, not a facet of professional scientific publishing..

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O n November 4, 2019, The Scientist ran a revealing Q&A highlighting a recent survey published in eLife . Responses from early career researchers (ECRs) and other scientists drew attention to a widespread, unethical practice to which academic scientists have too long resigned themselves—peer review ghostwriting (8:e48425, 2019).

As defined in that paper, peer review ghostwriting occurs when scientists hand over manuscripts that they have agreed to review for journal editors to graduate students or postdocs in their research groups. The involvement of the junior scientists is not typically disclosed to the journal, so editors work under the impression that the invited reviewer developed and wrote the resulting manuscript review themselves.

Survey results reported in the eLife paper provided the first quantitative evidence for the prevalence of this practice, as well as for the practice the study authors refer to as co-reviewing. In a strict sense,...

See “ Trainees Often Ghostwrite PI’s Peer Reviews: Survey ”

Whether co-reviewers are named or not, this practice, along with the more patently unethical ghostwriting, has no defensible place in the live arena of academic publishing. In this professional context, journal publications are major forces in determining academic career success, supporting the livelihoods of researchers, influencing government policy, furthering research funding, advancing scientific and medical progress, and supporting the academic enterprise. Having inexperienced reviewers usher manuscripts through the essential process of peer review is a disservice to submitting authors. Co-reviewing, even when trainee reviewers have been named and credited, has the potential to harm the careers of the scientists who submitted the manuscript under review in the event that poorly informed, deficient reviews result in rejections of papers that are crucial to obtaining research funds, academic promotion, professional reputation, salary compensation, and so on. Rather, training in peer review practice and ethics should be at least started, if not completed, before a young scientist has the opportunity to review actual submitted manuscripts and potentially alter that process in a negative way.

Whether co-reviewers are named or not, this practice, along with the more patently unethical ghostwriting, has no defensible place in the live arena of academic publishing.

Both ghostwriting and co-reviewing can also have the effect of denying trainees credit for the work they have contributed. The potential for exploitation of graduate student and postdoc ghostwriters and co-reviewers is certainly a good reason for concern and intervention, but the more significant problem for academic science—one that was not considered by the authors of the eLife paper—is how these practices contribute to the general erosion of academic integrity. Prospective study authors submit their manuscripts for peer review by professional journals with the reasonable expectation and agreement that their submissions will be provided fair, expert, and confidential peer review by another qualified member of their field. Ghostwriting and co-review completely violate the professional ethics of this contract.

Ghostwriting is clearly unethical. But arguing that co-reviewing is acceptable because it trains ECRs to be better manuscript reviewers is a convenient rationalization to excuse a similarly unethical practice. The place to teach journal manuscript review is in open working forums such as departmental journal clubs, and in graduate-level subject courses and special topics seminars. It is interesting that the survey in the eLife paper did not list graduate classes as a response choice for where respondents had obtained training for reviewing manuscripts, though the authors did propose the introduction of compulsory teaching of manuscript reviewing in graduate courses. 

Most journals provide reviewers with detailed instructions for the desired content and format of manuscript reviews. What they do not do, and should not be expected to do, is teach reviewers how to evaluate and judge the significance of manuscripts, their technical quality, the soundness of their arguments and conclusions, the integrity of their conduct, and their overall scientific value. This expertise should be learned and developed in the course of an academic career by attention to it at every stage of training. And this essential aspect of a scientist’s education needs to be complemented with an emphasis on proper ethical conduct in journal manuscript review.

The eLife paper authors rightly advise that something needs to be done about these aspects of peer review in the interest of improving the quality of academia. They recommend ending the practice of ghostwriting and crafting more-substantive guidelines around co-reviewing. They suggest that journal editors codify mechanisms for disclosing and crediting the contributions of noninvited reviewers, who are often members of the invited reviewer’s lab. But journals already have a process for invited reviewers to decline the invitation and propose alternative reviewers, such as a trainee, that the journal editor can then decide to accept or not. In this way, interested and properly trained ECRs can begin to establish their own credentials in the eyes of journal editors with appropriate instruction and guidance, without compromising the integrity of the journal manuscript review process and of academia as a whole.

It is up to institutions of higher learning and their members to remedy the breach of publishing integrity that ghostwriting and co-review cause. Often in academia, ethical conduct is taught but not practiced. A cultural shift toward more-ethical practices will require that all academics work to better align their actions with the well-reasoned ideals of ethical conduct. It is simple; we need to begin teaching ethical manuscript review as a core principle of academic life and responsibility. The eLife paper shows that the scientific community is ready for this change. College and university faculty simply need to start teaching it and following it themselves.

James L. Sherley is the founder and current director of Asymmetrex LLC, a company focused on developing adult tissue stem cell technologies and applying them to clinical drug discovery and cellular medicine. Before starting Asymmetrex, he spent more than 20 years as a principal investigator leading laboratory research programs in cancer center, independent research institute, and research university settings.

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Ghostwriters Emerge From the Shadows

Practitioners of the solitary and highly secretive profession got together to compare notes and celebrate their work.

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Madeleine Morel holds a microphone, standing up against a backdrop of bookshelves, while wearing a dark jacket and a black and white striped shirt.

By Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter

Ghostwriting is a secretive profession. It’s long been maintained that a good ghost writer, like a well-behaved child in an extreme version of the old proverb, should be neither seen nor heard.

So it was unusual for a group of around 140 ghostwriters to gather, as they did in Manhattan on Monday, to schmooze and celebrate their work with awards, panel discussions and keynote speeches. The one-day conference, called the Gathering of the Ghosts, took place at a moment when ghostwriting is in high demand and gaining recognition as an art form of its own, after years of operating largely in the shadows.

“There’s great value in building this community because of the nature of what we do,” said Daniel Paisner, who hosts a podcast about ghostwriting called “As Told To” and has collaborated on 17 New York Times best-sellers. “We do it in a vacuum, sitting alone in our underwear in our offices. We don’t get out much. So I think it’s helpful to be able to compare notes.”

Held at the New York Academy of Medicine, in a room lined with old, leather-bound medical books overlooking a snowy Central Park, the event included panels about finding the right publisher for a project, whether A.I. might render ghostwriters irrelevant and conversations about how much a ghostwriter can charge (the consensus: more). The profession has a history of being undervalued, and one panelist advised everyone in the audience to double their rates and add 20 percent.

“Is it good to be a ghostwriter?” Madeleine Morel, an agent who specializes in matchmaking book projects with ghostwriters, said at the event. “I’ll paraphrase Dickens: It’s the best of times and the worst of times. It’s the best of times because there’s never been so much work out there. It’s the worst of times because it’s become so competitive.”

Jodi Lipper, who has ghostwritten 25 books, including a collaboration with the shoe designer Steve Madden, said she was gratified to see awards that recognize ghostwriters for their talents. “There has been this misconception for a long time that ghostwriters are people who couldn't write their own book, that they are these hacks,” she said.

Lipper and other ghostwriters argue that their job requires not only literary chops but a host of other skills, including wrangling talent and drawing out illustrative stories from their subjects. The writer must also effectively channel the subject’s voice, so readers feel like they’re hearing directly from the person whose face is on the cover.

“I have a whole process — like for every client, I have a different scent,” said Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts. For one project she might put lavender essential oils in her diffuser, she explained, and for another, she might use lemon. This helps her slip into her subject’s voices, she said.

Lewis-Giggetts received an award at the conference on Monday for the book “Sisterhood Heals,” although the name on the cover is Joy Harden Bradford, Ph.D. (Her scent for that book was lemongrass.) She also writes under her own name, and her essay collection, “Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration,” won an N.A.A.C.P. Image Award last year.

“I have my own work, but I’m still doing a lot of ghosting,” she said. “Quite frankly, because it pays the bills.”

While many celebrities and politicians maintain the pretense that they are writing their own books, it’s becoming more common to acknowledge one’s ghostwriter and the occupation has gained more visibility. Collaborators for celebrity memoirs — which can be enormously lucrative for publishers — are in increasingly high demand, with some making six figures for their work.

The genres that many ghostwriters work in — memoirs by actors and musicians, athletes, chief executives and self-help gurus — are the types of books that publishers are pouring money into, because a well-known author with an established following can potentially sell millions of copies. Some of last year’s top-selling nonfiction books were ghostwritten memoirs — Britney Spears’ “ The Woman in Me ” and Prince Harry’s “ Spare .”

The field’s growth has been good for writers, too. Often, professionals want a book to their name: Books can spruce up a résumé, or help land keynote speeches or consulting gigs. Those authors also need ghostwriters.

Dan Gerstein, the chief executive of Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that co-hosted Monday’s conference, said the field is flooded with former journalists, for example.

“Ghostwriting is the best thing that’s happened to a lot of writers, because without ghostwriting I don’t know what they’d be doing,” said Morel, the agent, who noted that she has orchestrated ghostwriter matches for more than 60 New York Times best-sellers. “Former editors, former journalists, former mid-list writers — they’d probably be working at Starbucks.”

Top-tier ghostwriters are also being lauded for their literary skills, with some publishers even touting their participation in a project as a hint to readers and booksellers that a memoir will be juicy and artfully written. The actress Demi Moore gave ample credit to her ghostwriter, the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy, for working on Moore’s memoir, “ Inside Out .”

In a sign of how much more open ghostwriters have become about their work, J.R. Moehringer, an in-demand and widely acclaimed ghostwriter who has worked with the tennis star Andre Agassi and Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, wrote in The New Yorker about the challenges of working on Prince Harry’s memoir.

Moehringer revealed debates that he and Harry had over particular scenes, and described how he would talk himself down when they clashed: “For the thousandth time in my ghostwriting career, I reminded myself: It’s not your effing book.”

Still, some stigma remains around the profession, and organizers and attendees of the ghost gathering hoped the event would help to clear misconceptions.

“There’s so much onus on your own work, on your own voice, on your own story,” said Holly Gleason, who was nominated for an award for a book she wrote with the country musician Miranda Lambert. “But the truth is, telling a story really well is important.”

But some delicacy lingers around revealing a ghostwriter’s participation in a work. To be eligible for awards, both the official authors and their paid collaborators had to co-submit for consideration and agree to share the award.

Years ago, Paisner said, he was invited to a dinner party at the apartment of former Mayor Ed Koch, where Paisner introduced himself as the person who helped Koch write his book. Later that evening, Koch asked for a word. “He said, ‘I would prefer if you never say that again,’” Paisner recalled.

For a long time, Paisner said, people seemed to believe that these books were written by having a person of renown speak into a tape recorder and then bringing in a ghostwriter to transcribe those thoughts.

“It is not that, and I think readers are slowly coming around to accept that it is not that,” Paisner said. “That these are not the musing of the rich and famous as dictated to the lowly ghostwriter.”

  More about Elizabeth A. Harris

Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times. More about Alexandra Alter

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Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

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  • 12 February 2024

China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and research misconduct

  • Smriti Mallapaty

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The reputation of Chinese science has been "adversely affected" by the number of retractions in recent years, according to a government notice. Credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty

Chinese universities are days away from the deadline to complete a nationwide audit of retracted research papers and probe of research misconduct. By 15 February, universities must submit to the government a comprehensive list of all academic articles retracted from English- and Chinese-language journals in the past three years. They need to clarify why the papers were retracted and investigate cases involving misconduct, according to a 20 November notice from the Ministry of Education’s Department of Science, Technology and Informatization.

The government launched the nationwide self-review in response to Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, retracting a large number of papers by Chinese authors. These retractions, along with those from other publishers, “have adversely affected our country’s academic reputation and academic environment”, the notice states.

A Nature analysis shows that last year, Hindawi issued more than 9,600 retractions, of which the vast majority — about 8,200 — had a co-author in China. Nearly 14,000 retraction notices, of which some three-quarters involved a Chinese co-author, were issued by all publishers in 2023.

This is “the first time we’ve seen such a national operation on retraction investigations”, says Xiaotian Chen, a library and information scientist at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, who has studied retractions and research misconduct in China. Previous investigations have largely been carried out on a case-by-case basis — but this time, all institutions have to conduct their investigations simultaneously, says Chen.

Tight deadline

The ministry’s notice set off a chain of alerts, cascading to individual university departments. Bulletins posted on university websites required researchers to submit their retractions by a range of dates, mostly in January — leaving time for universities to collate and present the data.

Although the alerts included lists of retractions that the ministry or the universities were aware of, they also called for unlisted retractions to be added.

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More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record

According to Nature ’s analysis, which includes only English-language journals, more than 17,000 retraction notices for papers published by Chinese co-authors have been issued since 1 January 2021, which is the start of the period of review specified in the notice. The analysis, an update of one conducted in December , used the Retraction Watch database, augmented with retraction notices collated from the Dimensions database, and involved assistance from Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse in France. It is unclear whether the official lists contain the same number of retracted papers.

Regardless, the timing to submit the information will be tight, says Shu Fei, a bibliometrics scientist at Hangzhou Dianzi University in China. The ministry gave universities less than three months to complete their self-review — and this was cut shorter by the academic winter break, which typically starts in mid-January and concludes after the Chinese New Year, which fell this year on 10 February.

“The timing is not good,” he says. Shu expects that universities are most likely to submit only a preliminary report of their researchers’ retracted papers included on the official lists.

But Wang Fei, who studies research-integrity policy at Dalian University of Technology in China, says that because the ministry has set a deadline, universities will work hard to submit their findings on time.

Researchers with retracted papers will have to explain whether the retraction was owing to misconduct, such as image manipulation, or an honest mistake, such as authors identifying errors in their own work, says Chen: “In other words, they may have to defend themselves.” Universities then must investigate and penalize misconduct. If a researcher fails to declare their retracted paper and it is later uncovered, they will be punished, according to the ministry notice. The cost of not reporting is high, says Chen. “This is a very serious measure.”

It is not known what form punishment might take, but in 2021, China’s National Health Commission posted the results of its investigations into a batch of retracted papers. Punishments included salary cuts, withdrawal of bonuses, demotions and timed suspensions from applying for research grants and rewards.

The notice states explicitly that the first corresponding author of a paper is responsible for submitting the response. This requirement will largely address the problem of researchers shirking responsibility for collaborative work, says Li Tang, a science- and innovation-policy researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. The notice also emphasizes due process, says Tang. Researchers alleged to have committed misconduct have a right to appeal during the investigation.

The notice is a good approach for addressing misconduct, says Wang. Previous efforts by the Chinese government have stopped at issuing new research-integrity guidelines that were poorly implemented, she says. And when government bodies did launch self-investigations of published literature, they were narrower in scope and lacked clear objectives. This time, the target is clear — retractions — and the scope is broad, involving the entire university research community, she says.

“Cultivating research integrity takes time, but China is on the right track,” says Tang.

It is not clear what the ministry will do with the flurry of submissions. Wang says that, because the retraction notices are already freely available, publicizing the collated lists and underlying reasons for retraction could be useful. She hopes that a similar review will be conducted every year “to put more pressure” on authors and universities to monitor research integrity.

What happens next will reveal how seriously the ministry regards research misconduct, says Shu. He suggests that, if the ministry does not take further action after the Chinese New Year, the notice could be an attempt to respond to the reputational damage caused by the mass retractions last year.

The ministry did not respond to Nature ’s questions about the misconduct investigation.

Chen says that, regardless of what the ministry does with the information, the reporting process itself will help to curb misconduct because it is “embarrassing to the people in the report”.

But it might primarily affect researchers publishing in English-language journals. Retraction notices in Chinese-language journals are rare.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00397-x

Data analysis by Richard Van Noorden.

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A community of sleuths hunting for errors in scientific research have sent shockwaves through some of the most prestigious research institutions in the world — and the science community at large.

High-profile cases of alleged image manipulations in papers authored by the former president at Stanford University and leaders at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have made national media headlines, and some top science leaders think this could be just the start.

“At the rate things are going, we expect another one of these to come up every few weeks,” said Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of the Science family of scientific journals, whose namesake publication is one of the two most influential in the field. 

The sleuths argue their work is necessary to correct the scientific record and prevent generations of researchers from pursuing dead-end topics because of flawed papers. And some scientists say it’s time for universities and academic publishers to reform how they address flawed research. 

“I understand why the sleuths finding these things are so pissed off,” said Michael Eisen, a biologist, the former editor of the journal eLife and a prominent voice of reform in scientific publishing. “Everybody — the author, the journal, the institution, everybody — is incentivized to minimize the importance of these things.” 

For about a decade, science sleuths unearthed widespread problems in scientific images in published papers, publishing concerns online but receiving little attention. 

That began to change last summer after then-Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who is a neuroscientist, stepped down from his post after scrutiny of alleged image manipulations in studies he helped author and a report criticizing his laboratory culture. Tessier-Lavigne was not found to have engaged in misconduct himself, but members of his lab appeared to manipulate images in dubious ways, a report from a scientific panel hired to examine the allegations said. 

In January, a scathing post from a blogger exposed questionable work from top leaders at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute , which subsequently asked journals to retract six articles and issue corrections for dozens more. 

In a resignation statement , Tessier-Lavigne noted that the panel did not find that he knew of misconduct and that he never submitted papers he didn’t think were accurate. In a statement from its research integrity officer, Dana-Farber said it took decisive action to correct the scientific record and that image discrepancies were not necessarily evidence an author sought to deceive. 

“We’re certainly living through a moment — a public awareness — that really hit an inflection when the Marc Tessier-Lavigne matter happened and has continued steadily since then, with Dana-Farber being the latest,” Thorp said. 

Now, the long-standing problem is in the national spotlight, and new artificial intelligence tools are only making it easier to spot problems that range from decades-old errors and sloppy science to images enhanced unethically in photo-editing software.  

This heightened scrutiny is reshaping how some publishers are operating. And it’s pushing universities, journals and researchers to reckon with new technology, a potential backlog of undiscovered errors and how to be more transparent when problems are identified. 

This comes at a fraught time in academic halls. Bill Ackman, a venture capitalist, in a post on X last month discussed weaponizing artificial intelligence to identify plagiarism of leaders at top-flight universities where he has had ideological differences, raising questions about political motivations in plagiarism investigations. More broadly, public trust in scientists and science has declined steadily in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center .

Eisen said he didn’t think sleuths’ concerns over scientific images had veered into “McCarthyist” territory.

“I think they’ve been targeting a very specific type of problem in the literature, and they’re right — it’s bad,” Eisen said. 

Scientific publishing builds the base of what scientists understand about their disciplines, and it’s the primary way that researchers with new findings outline their work for colleagues. Before publication, scientific journals consider submissions and send them to outside researchers in the field for vetting and to spot errors or faulty reasoning, which is called peer review. Journal editors will review studies for plagiarism and for copy edits before they’re published. 

That system is not perfect and still relies on good-faith efforts by researchers to not manipulate their findings.

Over the past 15 years, scientists have grown increasingly concerned about problems that some researchers were digitally altering images in their papers to skew or emphasize results. Discovering irregularities in images — typically of experiments involving mice, gels or blots — has become a larger priority of scientific journals’ work.   

Jana Christopher, an expert on scientific images who works for the Federation of European Biochemical Societies and its journals, said the field of image integrity screening has grown rapidly since she began working in it about 15 years ago. 

At the time, “nobody was doing this and people were kind of in denial about research fraud,” Christopher said. “The common view was that it was very rare and every now and then you would find someone who fudged their results.” 

Today, scientific journals have entire teams dedicated to dealing with images and trying to ensure their accuracy. More papers are being retracted than ever — with a record 10,000-plus pulled last year, according to a Nature analysis . 

A loose group of scientific sleuths have added outside pressure. Sleuths often discover and flag errors or potential manipulations on the online forum PubPeer. Some sleuths receive little or no payment or public recognition for their work.

“To some extent, there is a vigilantism around it,” Eisen said. 

An analysis of comments on more than 24,000 articles posted on PubPeer found that more than 62% of comments on PubPeer were related to image manipulation. 

For years, sleuths relied on sharp eyes, keen pattern recognition and an understanding of photo manipulation tools. In the past few years, rapidly developing artificial intelligence tools, which can scan papers for irregularities, are supercharging their work. 

Now, scientific journals are adopting similar technology to try to prevent errors from reaching publication. In January, Science announced that it was using an artificial intelligence tool called Proofig to scan papers that were being edited and peer-reviewed for publication. 

Thorp, the Science editor-in-chief, said the family of six journals added the tool “quietly” into its workflow about six months before that January announcement. Before, the journal was reliant on eye-checks to catch these types of problems. 

Thorp said Proofig identified several papers late in the editorial process that were not published because of problematic images that were difficult to explain and other instances in which authors had “logical explanations” for issues they corrected before publication.

“The serious errors that cause us not to publish a paper are less than 1%,” Thorp said.

In a statement, Chris Graf, the research integrity director at the publishing company Springer Nature, said his company is developing and testing “in-house AI image integrity software” to check for image duplications. Graf’s research integrity unit currently uses Proofig to help assess articles if concerns are raised after publication. 

Graf said processes varied across its journals, but that some Springer Nature publications manually check images for manipulations with Adobe Photoshop tools and look for inconsistencies in raw data for experiments that visualize cell components or common scientific experiments.

“While the AI-based tools are helpful in speeding up and scaling up the investigations, we still consider the human element of all our investigations to be crucial,” Graf said, adding that image recognition software is not perfect and that human expertise is required to protect against false positives and negatives. 

No tool will catch every mistake or cheat. 

“There’s a lot of human beings in that process. We’re never going to catch everything,” Thorp said. “We need to get much better at managing this when it happens, as journals, institutions and authors.”

Many science sleuths had grown frustrated after their concerns seemed to be ignored or as investigations trickled along slowly and without a public resolution.  

Sholto David, who publicly exposed concerns about Dana-Farber research in a blog post, said he largely “gave up” on writing letters to journal editors about errors he discovered because their responses were so insufficient. 

Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and longtime image sleuth, said she has frequently flagged image problems and “nothing happens.” 

Leaving public comments questioning research figures on PubPeer can start a public conversation over questionable research, but authors and research institutions often don’t respond directly to the online critiques. 

While journals can issue corrections or retractions, it’s typically a research institution’s or a university’s responsibility to investigate cases. When cases involve biomedical research supported by federal funding, the federal Office of Research Integrity can investigate. 

Thorp said the institutions need to move more swiftly to take responsibility when errors are discovered and speak plainly and publicly about what happened to earn the public’s trust.  

“Universities are so slow at responding and so slow at running through their processes, and the longer that goes on, the more damage that goes on,” Thorp said. “We don’t know what happened if instead of launching this investigation Stanford said, ‘These papers are wrong. We’re going to retract them. It’s our responsibility. But for now, we’re taking the blame and owning up to this.’” 

Some scientists worry that image concerns are only scratching the surface of science’s integrity issues — problems in images are simply much easier to spot than data errors in spreadsheets. 

And while policing bad papers and seeking accountability is important, some scientists think those measures will be treating symptoms of the larger problem: a culture that rewards the careers of those who publish the most exciting results, rather than the ones that hold up over time. 

“The scientific culture itself does not say we care about being right; it says we care about getting splashy papers,” Eisen said. 

Evan Bush is a science reporter for NBC News. He can be reached at [email protected].

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If you have read the likes of Stephen King and Joanne Rowling, then you have had firsthand experience with a professional ghostwriter. As a student, you can also solicit academic ghostwriting services from best educational writing websites like GradeCrest.

But just what is an academic ghostwriting service? Academic ghostwriting services are becoming a preference for many students. Mostly, students double studies and work, which leaves little or no time for them to write high-quality college papers, complete assignments, and attempt homework. But do the professors and instructors care enough to reduce the workload, No! 

So students find someone else, sort of an academic research assistant, who conducts research, gets scholarly sources, writes a decent piece of essay, research paper, and term paper, and consults with them the entire process. So, an academic ghostwriter works with a student, like a tutor-student relationship, to ensure that they get their ideas written on paper.

Can you hire a ghostwriter for a dissertation or thesis, yes you can. However, be ready to spend more time with them to get to the core of the paper written for you.

That said, you must carefully vet the ghostwriter you entrust with one of your essays or college papers.

Is Ghostwriting Plagiarism? Is Academic Ghostwriting Legal?

If you are tight on time and still need to catch up with the class, academic ghostwriting is entirely something you should consider. NB: Ghostwriting is never plagiarism neither are laws that make it illegal. Ghostwriters sell content and give rights to the person buying it. The same applies to academic ghostwriting service no Canadian, American, or UK law make academic ghostwriting illegal.  The mere attacks to academic ghostwriting are from people who do not appreciate the changing times. It is an issue with universities that do not understand the dynamics of how it works. Academic ghostwriting services help students get model papers or sample academic papers that they can use in completing theirs. Students have taken honor codes and cannot cheat by submitting such papers for credit. So, when they receive the papers with the sources, they can understand how to format papers in MLA, APA, Turabian, Chicago, ASA, or Harvard.

Academic ghostwriters are surrogate mothers that research the essays for students, write the essays, and submit the papers to the clients. As a college ghostwriting service, we encourage the clients to chip in ideas when the papers are yet to be or when they are being written. This way, we have our ghostwriters discuss the way forward with the students and come up with as many points as there is on a subject. Now, the same happens when handling either short deadlines or long-deadline college papers.

Get our ghostwriting service for formatting, editing, styling, proofreading, writing masters and Ph.D. theses and dissertation, writing dissertation chapters, and conducting research. We can also help you create PowerPoint presentations, posters, flyers, personal statements, MBAs and DBA papers, data analysis, and all types of essays.

Why Students Prefer Using Academic Ghost Writing Services

As stated above, students all over the world are entering a competitive space. Everyone wants to get an A-grade research paper, term paper, essays, discussion posts, and you name it. If you have ever read a negative blog on ghost academic writing and wondered if ghostwriting academic papers is illegal, we have something to keep you thinking.

If you were an architect and need to build a house, yet you do not have time, what would you do? You would definitely hire someone on command to draw the best design for you, right? That is the same way academic ghostwriting works. Students who are part-time professionals entrust ghostwriting experts with their academic work.

Here are some of the top reasons why you need our ghostwriting services:

  • When writing different types of academic papers assigned in high-school, college, and university.
  • If you need essays, admission essays, term papers, reports, lab reports, marketing plans, business plans, and coursework projects done as you do other personal stuff.
  • When looking for professional paper assistance to get plagiarism-free and well-researched papers.
  • You need a PowerPoint presentation done for you while you finalize preparing for your presentation or dissertation defense.

There are many reasons to get help from professional ghostwriting services. What matters is whether you get a reliable academic ghostwriting service like GradeCrest.

Profile of our Academic Ghost Writers for Hire

Academic ghostwriting services are common among bright students and professionals. Did you know that ghostwriting services can perfectly handle your essays and even book reports and reviews? Here is a bit of what our ghostwriters do:

  • Help you generate topic ideas for your academic writing tasks such as essays, research papers, and term papers.
  • Assist with drafting the outline and formulating the best structure of a paper.
  • Selecting the best sources for your academic papers.
  • Writing plagiarism-free papers for you.
  • Editing and proofreading the college and university papers for you.
  • Delivering your research paper orders on time.

But who are they:

  • Holders of Masters and Ph.D. degrees from reputable universities.
  • Native English Speaker.
  • Understand academic writing processes.
  • Privy to the different types of essays, research papers, and college papers.
  • Understand how to format academic papers.
  • Can write both long-form and short-form College and university papers.
  • Has passed our rigorous internal tests and participates in professional writing development courses.
  • Can write a high-grade paper with minimal to no mistake.
  • Carefully handpicked and trained to become the best academic ghostwriter.

An F sounds like a poor grade to get you some slot in the corporate world. It can even cripple your GPA. When different tutors or professors assign you to work, you cannot land your hand in all of them. Therefore, it would be prudent to reach out to us for the best-ghostwriting services. Better yet, we have the best ghostwriters for academic ghostwriting with a guarantee of distinction-level papers.

How our Professional Academic Ghostwriting Service Works

No academic ghostwriting service has made it easier to order essays online. With our service, you can quickly pay for essays online. Here is the drill:

  • Click on any order now button, which will redirect you to our order form.
  • Fill as much information as you can about your college or university papers.
  • Choose the academic level to help us match you up with the right academic ghostwriter. Graduate ghostwriting experts handle graduate-level papers as well as undergraduate level papers.
  • Pay for the ghostwriting services you wish to receive. We have even made it easier as you can get discount codes to your emails and use them when paying. Besides, the calculator enables you to estimate how much money to pay for our academic ghostwriting services.
  • We assign your papers to a qualified academic ghostwriter who creates a custom academic paper for you within the deadline.
  • You can communicate with your ghostwriter as they work on your ghost story. Note that our ghostwritten essays are of high standards and are always delivered on time. Besides, we do not tolerate plagiarized papers. All our essays are non-plagiarized.
  • If you get a paper and feel there is a need for some areas to be tweaked, our free-revisions policy covers you.
  • And we have the best satisfaction guarantee in place.

Our papers are written from scratch. You can bet on us for high-quality college papers . Besides, if you are short of time, we can handle even essays due in 3 hours.

What Ghost Writing Services Do We Offer?

Academic ghostwriting has bud out to become a stable industry. Like what the sea anemone is to the clownfish, the academic ghostwriting industry is a mutual support system to the higher education system. In an article written by Julia Molinari  in the Guardian, academic proofreading is a common practice among students, and it is not illegal.

Only when novice writers write your research papers will you have a paper carefully peppered with inaccuracies and full of plagiarism. Otherwise, when you find academic writing as a complicated endeavour and get our academic ghostwriting services, you will be assured of professional handling your academic work.

The main differentiating factor between us and our competitors is that you converse with the client as they handle your work. Besides, we have a progressive delivery arrangement where you get periodic drafts to ensure your expert essay writer is on track.

Our ghostwriting help is affordable and does not cost you an arm and a leg. Moreover, we cover different subjects. Here is a sneak pick of what to expect from us.

Thesis and Dissertation Writing

We have in the past, prioritized on client satisfaction. We cherish graduate and MBA students who find worth in what we do. Our academic ghostwriting service serves as equally the best dissertation ghostwriting service . We have delivered world-class professional academic ghostwriting services to many clients.

A major reason why we remain on top is the competent team of well-educated and dedicated dissertation ghostwriters . Our dissertation writers can customize the dissertations to meet your requirements. 

With the expert dissertation ghostwriters in our tuff, we are always confident of meeting the strict university requirements.

We can help you write dissertation proposals and then proceed to write all the dissertation chapters for you. If you are looking for timely delivered and professionally written dissertations, GradeCrest is your happy haven. 

We also help with SPSS, STATA, and EXCEL in data analysis. We are simply the best dissertation ghostwriting service with experienced professional dissertation ghostwriters. You can always get help with your dissertation.  We are experts in helping with thesis writing.

Capstone Papers Research

In college and university, you will be required to write capstone projects. If you are a nursing student, completing a nursing capstone paper or project is a given. Well, writing a capstone paper, which comes in your last school year, can dampen your mood.

Our academic ghostwriting services give you an easy time with your capstone projects. Our professional capstone research paper writers can write a capstone project for you.

Our premium capstone ghostwriting service presents papers in a well-defined format for academic papers.

Our writers will present you with research from scratch, a good topic idea for your capstone project, and an outline for confirmation by your professor. Once confirmed, our academic ghostwriters put their expertise to work and produce the best papers for you. 

It matters not the level of academic you are, so long as you need someone to write your capstone project, our capstone writing service is assuredly the best.

Term Paper Writing

As your life in college advances, you will notice that you need to write term papers. And if they cannot meet Professor Raymond Hames’  standards of writing a term paper, you will need to hire a ghostwriter to help you with term paper ghostwriting.

Again, our academic ghostwriting service has become the first resort for a student seeking term paper help . Our term paper ghostwriting team can help you choose a good topic for your term paper, plan the paper, and write a high-quality term paper. 

Our expert term paper writers have all it takes to produce quality papers. So, if you are stuck with this type of paper, do not hesitate to get help.

Research Paper Help

Writing research papers is an intensive process. It spans from researching for scholarly sources, generating topic ideas, choosing the best titles, and writing a deeply-researched essay. Given its intense nature, students dread research paper writing, which is why they entrust writing research papers to research paper ghostwriting services.

With our ghostwriting service, you can buy research papers online. When you do so, our research paper experts will do everything from scratch within the specified deadlines. Ours is a leading and smart research paper writing service .

We only have experts in different subject matters and not rookie academic writers. We are waiting to assist you with any type of research paper.

Case Study Writing

Writing a case study is a prerequisite for students undertaking sociology, psychology, nursing, medicine and health, business and management, accounting, finance, and tourism, to mention a few. Case study writing can be a tedious process.

For instance, if asked to write a case study of Google LLC, Amazon, Apple, Keurig, or Carrefour. You have to go through the intensive process of analyzing the company annual and financial statements before coming with a PESTEL, SWOT analysis, Porters five force analysis, and a great case study.

Sometimes, it is a leadership case study, and you are not just good at research. In all these cases, our case study ghostwriting services might be a fortune in waiting for you. Our expert case study writers will analyze the case study for you. Each case study comes with a profound thesis statement that hooks the markers from the beginning to the end.

At Gradecrest you can get a case study writing services that produce quality, intelligent, smartly-written, and organized case studies.

Marketing and Business Plans Ghostwriting

Writing either a business plan or a marketing plan is no mean feat. You require to understand the right format of a business plan or a marketing plan to write the best. Sometimes you don’t know how to write a marketing plan to clearly outline a marketing strategy.

If this is the case contracting a marketing plan ghostwriter will be an inevitable step. Our extensive marketing plan writing help service can benefit both students and organizations. The same applies to our business plan writing service.

Maybe you have an idea but do not know how to write an excellent business plan; we can spark your entrepreneurial journey and ambitions by writing the best business plan. Our marketing and business plan ghostwriting service is the gold standard in the industry.

Reasons to Trust GradeCrest Ghostwriting Services

Our ghostwritten papers have found fame among college and university students. Within our team, we have administrators, support, and technical staff who work day and night to ensure you succeed in your education.  Professionally, we are always leading in the academic writing world due to diligence, persistence, and expertise. Here are a few benefits of our low-cost academic ghostwriting services.

  • Everything is written from scratch. All the papers processed and bought on our website are written from scratch. With the latest plagiarism-detection tools, we can smell and smoke out plagiarized papers. And once we do, responsible writers are banished from our fraternity. Such level of strictness has made us a topnotch ghostwriting service preferred by students.
  • Deadlines are met. Out of 10 papers, 9 are always submitted on time. The 1 is room for error and depends on the cooperation between the client and the writer. We have a last-minute service to cater to writing short notice deadlines. As part of the details you fill, we require the deadline to ensure that the writers deliver the paper early enough for proofreading and editing.
  • Round the clock assistance . GradeCrest is open 24/7 and 365 days annually. When you want last-minute editing on the paper , our support can get a writer for the same. Whether it is just a few pages or inquiry of a long paper like a thesis or a dissertation, you can always consult with us for free.
  • No complexity scares us off. We have both technical and non-technical writers. Even when your project is extremely challenging, we will get the best writer for it. Our ghostwriting specialists accept any academic challenge. Bring it on!
  • Affordable Pricing. Ghostwriting papers at our website is cheap. We consider the fact that as a student you have a tight budget. But with us on your case, the majority of the students agree we have the low-cost academic writing help services.
  • Safety and Confidentiality. When you pay for academic ghostwriting services, you are safely secured. We only use trusted merchants to receive payments. We never disclose your data to any third party. See our privacy policy.  Besides, once you order, your paper can never be re-sold or reproduced to another client.

Try the Most Creative Academic Writing Company

Academic and business writing is a preserve of the creatives. Part of what the professors assess is to what extent you can use your critical thinking and creativity. With that in mind, our ghostwriting experts have accomplished the highest level of college and university education.  

They come from top universities in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States of America.  For that, we have creative, academic, business, and technical caliber writers.

When you pay for papers from our website, you get content that is great and written from scratch by top ghostwriters for hire. The ghostwriters have amassed experience to write texts that are original and of high quality. Even the most distinguished authors and figures have confessed to being using ghostwriting services.

There are two approaches to our academic ghostwriting services.  First off, an academic ghostwriter will choose a topic in consultation with you and based on the assignment prompt. They will then select the sources to use and send the links or PDF files to you for approval or vetting. Then with your go-ahead, they can write your academic papers to the highest levels.

Secondly, the ghostwriter can write a perfect paper for you and only when you approve of it can it be completed. Either way, it is better to hire a ghostwriter for your academic essays than stare at blank pages or submit nothing at all.

Education is expensive, and after investing in fees, you just cannot let a tough essay come between you and success. It is good to invest either side, and that is why our academic ghostwriting service exists.

Why Students Prefer Hiring Our Services

Academic ghostwriting services are not illegal. Besides, every student wants to submit a paper that guarantees them a high grade. Our custom paper writing service covers your back when you face challenges writing essays. We have expert academic writers who help you produce high-quality papers as well as choose good topics for your papers.

Using our ghostwriting services has many advantages as already outlined. We have been entrusted to accomplish different kinds of academic assignments, and not a single client has ever complained of unsatisfactory services.

So, you can join the bandwagon of students successfully doing their stuff as we take care of their papers or stay lowly and do your papers the best way that has been bringing poor grades. The good thing is that lawyers, politicians, professors, nurses, pilots, and other many professionals have used our services.

You can hire affordable academic ghostwriters from GradeCrest. Rest assured you will get professional help with your essay.

And like a ghost, we only do the writing, and yours is to own it. Even when our essay writing experts handle your papers, your insights are always a gem. So, we encourage all-round communication for the best outcome. Enough with the inferior grades, hire an academic ghostwriter online and get the best.

Ghostwriting has been an ultra-safe and convenient solution to college students and university students who want to hone their writing skills. It is also a good resort for students who fear meeting deadlines. If you procrastinated it this long, our academic ghostwriting services can ‘undo your mistake. Get help now!

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Gradecrest is a professional writing service that provides original model papers. We offer personalized services along with research materials for assistance purposes only. All the materials from our website should be used with proper references. See our Terms of Use Page for proper details.

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Academic Ghostwriting by ACAD WRITE

Professional ghostwriting services with 18 years’ experience.

Academic ghostwriting by ACAD WRITE is the ideal solution for your academic paper or thesis. For 18 years, our agency has been convincing its customers with high-quality and discrete writing services . Our competent and reliable ghostwriters do not only provide support in academic writing but also in empirical research and statistical data analysis, for example, for your bachelor or master thesis

Aufgeschlagenes Buch liegt auf einem Tisch in Bibliothek

Here You find Reliable Help with Your Studies

ACAD WRITE is specialised in providing its customers with flexible and versatile support. All our ghostwriters are experts in their field and have the necessary skills for employing scientific tools. However, they do not only provide support in academic writing but also in statistical data analysis or by professionally proof-reading and editing your paper. From the beginning of your studies up to your habilitation – at our academic ghostwriting agency you will find the right support during all stages of your university research project or academic career. Amongst others, the following services are part of our specialist authors’, statisticians’ and ghostwriters’ core areas:

Essays, term and seminar papers Bachelor , master and doctoral theses Exposés and research applications Scientific publications Literature research Statistical analysis Proofreading and editing Legal opinions and solution sketches Medical writing Dissertation consulting for doctoral students

In all these areas, ACAD WRITE offers support tailored to your individual requirements and university’s guidelines. You will benefit from a system which has proven itself for more than 18 years and which guarantees our customers the highest quality and satisfaction.

Enquire without obligation and find a ghostwriter now

Professional and Versatile Academic Ghostwriting: Only Subject Experts Write for ACAD WRITE

We pride ourselves on our agency’s pool of authors including more than 400 hand-selected experts from nearly every scientific field. No matter if you are looking for help in writing a seminar paper in Roman provincial archaeology, a master thesis in engineering, or a dissertation in legal studies – we have the right ghostwriter for you who can provide the exact support you need. Not for nothing, ACAD WRITE has been the matchmaker for academic success.

Business, legal, MINT, or medical studies? Our ghostwriters’ skills and subject knowledge are versatile and also armed for the topic of your thesis!

ACAD WRITE composes quality-guaranteed seminar, bachelor and master theses

The experienced quality management of our academic ghostwriting service guarantees you the best results for papers and theses produced by ACAD WRITE. Not only our ghostwriters’ competence vouches for that. At our agency, even your smaller projects will benefit from several delivery steps including free feedback and correction loops. Our ACAD office ® allows you to stay in direct contact with your ghostwriter throughout the whole project execution while simultaneously protecting your identity. Before its final delivery, your project will be proofread by our professional editing service. By means of this dual-control principle, we can ensure that the work is linguistically and textually of high quality and academically unique, which we also confirm to you by a meticulous plagiarism assessment. Before, during and after your project, we offer you a secure SSL connection for the transmission of your data, while our Switzerland-based server ensures the best security and adherence to strict data protection standards.

Find out more about the ACAD WRITE’s quality guarantee

The individual solution for your academic project is just one click away

From our academic guidebook, how to reference in harvard style.

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Confidential help from academic ghostwriting pros

Order our ghostwriting services for only $13 per page. Benefit from high-quality papers by top 2% experts.

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What ghostwriting services we offer

We can help with research, write a chapter or the whole work from scratch, revise and edit your text. See our most popular works or find more ghost writer services here .

  • ✓ creative content
  • ✓ 100% uniqueness
  • ✓ strong argumentation
  • ✓ following the essay style
  • ✓ perfect manner of writing
  • ✓ work based on trusted sources
  • ✓ in-depth coverage of the topic
  • ✓ well-formatted references
  • ✓ plagiarism-free text
  • ✓ correct structure
  • ✓ unique research
  • ✓ proper terminology
  • ✓ consistent idea flow
  • ✓ potential scientific input
  • ✓ Deep topic research
  • ✓ Completely original text
  • ✓ Selection of relevant sources
  • ✓ Any thesis chapter help
  • ✓ Unlimited revisions
  • ✓ Relevant source selection
  • ✓ Literature from trusted databases
  • ✓ Thorough evaluation of the works
  • ✓ Current state of research assessed
  • ✓ Controversies and gaps identified
  • ✓ Tasks of any complexity
  • ✓ All academic levels covered
  • ✓ Accurate results guaranteed
  • ✓ Proper formatting style used
  • ✓ Compliance with the instructions

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What makes our ghost writer services different from others

Let an academic ghost writer help you.

research paper ghostwriters

How we help our clients by ghost writing academic papers

We build long-lasting customer trust by following three basic principles.

  • following your specific requirements
  • assigning a subject-related writer
  • imitating your writing style

research paper ghostwriters

  • progressive methods of research and analysis
  • accurate calculations
  • only credible data sources
  • compliance with your academic level demands

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  • double proofreading & formatting
  • originality score checking
  • free revision period

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Ghost writing paper experts at your service

Degree-holding experts are in charge of quality. Dedicated to their subjects, aimed at your satisfaction.

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Professional ghostwriting done in 4 steps

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Why Would You Need a Professional Ghost Writer for Your Work?

An academic ghostwriter company can provide you with support with the writing of your papers and essays to a high service standard. Something that is very important if you are struggling to get your academic work done on time and to the expectations of your audience or tutor.

Many students and other academics struggle with their writing in all areas and subjects. Often it is due simply to a lack of time or even down to the requirements for perfect English; something that many overseas students would struggle with. Whatever the reasons are for you to need help however we as a service have the ghostwriting help you need.

We offer you support through our academic ghostwriting services, which have been providing help to writers for more than 5 years. Ghostwriting help is provided only through highly qualified and experienced academic writers, ensuring you’d always get the quality of service support.

How Do We Provide the Best Ghostwriting Services for Papers?

We know you need to always be able to provide original ghostwriting papers that are unique to you. Providing ghostwritten work that is copied or simply modified from the original is likely to be spotted as such and can damage your reputation seriously and even get you removed from your studies. This is why ghostwriting writers work directly with you through the best ghostwriting services to ensure they fully understand just what you need.

They seek to understand just who your audience is and what you need to ghostwrite. All of the ghostwriting which is done with our ghostwriting services is done according to your academic instructions and needs. It is always a from-scratch service, and where reference is made to other sources, the quotes or paraphrased information would be correctly cited to give credit where it is due to.

Every academic ghost writer you’d be assigned through the service will make your draft available when it is completed for your review. You’d be able to suggest an unlimited number of revisions to the writing from ghostwriting services to ensure it fully meets your expectations. Ghostwriting experts continue working with you making changes until you are fully satisfied with how your ghostwritten work reads.

What Help Can an Academic Ghostwriter Provide?

We offer services for ghostwriting for both students and professional academics alike. Ghostwriting services also cover everything from high school students who need to submit an excellent ghostwritten essay for their assignment through to someone seeking to get their paper or manuscript published. We offer support with highly professional academic ghostwriting which is able to assist you at any point within your education or career in any subject area. Through us you can get support from a professional ghostwriting service with all of the following tasks:

  • Writing essay assignments with ghostwriting services
  • Ghostwriting websites for your research papers and capstone projects
  • Thesis ghost writing in your academic subject
  • Dissertation ghost writing
  • Journal article ghostwriting
  • Manuscript writing and publishing

Our Experienced Ghostwriting Writers Are Qualified to Help You

Getting ghost writing support with your writing is not an easy task, especially if you want it done to a high academic standard. Many of the ghostwriting services you find online would probably provide you with help through someone who knows nothing about your subject area and can barely speak English. This service results not just in poorly ghostwritten papers but also in plagiarism or poorly rewritten copies that will get you in serious trouble.

We know how to provide you with ghostwriting help you’d be able to trust. You need it to be supplied by service from someone who really understands not only what to ghostwrite but also the academic subject area in which you are writing. Our academic specialists in ghostwriting services have been carefully selected, and many have worked with us for more than 5 years. This ensures they are able to give you the level of needed professional ghostwriting assistance.

You’d always be working with an article ghost writer who is:

  • A holder of a post-graduate degree relevant to your academic subject
  • Highly experienced in ghostwriting the type of document you need to complete
  • Fully understands the requirements regarding structuring and formatting your documents
  • Has access to and a good understanding of the literature and research in your field
  • Is an excellent communicator with an excellent fluent level grasp of academic English

The Benefits of Working With Our Ghost Writing Site

Academic writing service still needs to be done in a way that would get the attention of your audience. As Robert Harris once said:

“A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader and will, therefore, open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.”

Every ghost writer we have is always dedicated to providing you with total satisfaction with the service they provide to you. They work tirelessly with you to provide ghostwriting, which is perfectly targeted to your audience as well as being accurate and ghostwritten to your own exacting expectations. After all, only if we provide you with the required academic service help would you return to us to use excellent ghostwriting services again.

We want you to be able to use a ghostwriter service with total confidence and to ensure we always provide you with:

  • Guaranteed original ghostwriting with a free plagiarism report to show their work is unique
  • Proofreading on all services to guarantee that ghostwriting would be free from errors
  • On-time service delivery within your chosen deadline so that you can always submit on time
  • Confidential ghostwriting so that you are the only one who knows you have had help
  • Very competitive pricing you’d find hard to better for an excellent level of service quality
  • Guaranteed satisfaction on our ghostwriters help or your money back

Contact us today for the best ghostwriter services you can trust and afford!

Looking for a professional ghostwriter?

You're in luck! The best professionals are already on Reedsy

Developmental editing

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What to look for in a ghostwriter.

Ghostwriters are the unsung heroes behind thousands of bestselling books — from celebrity autobiographies to business books and even works of fiction. If you have an important story to tell, but don’t possess the writing skills (or the time) to put it down on paper, you can hire a ghostwriter to write that book for you.

Ghostwriters are rarely the official “author” of the book, though they are sometimes mentioned as a “co-author” in a book’s Acknowledgments. Some ghostwriters prefer the term "collaborator" as they see the project as a partnership with the author. More often than not, however, they are bound by confidentiality clauses that prevents them from revealing which books they have ghostwritten.

But where can you find that dream ghostwriter, who’ll be able to capture your voice and tell your story the exact way you want it told?

Look no further, here are the professionals who can help

Search for ghostwriters near you

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Experienced Ghostwriter Specializing in Transformational Memoir and Biography | Content Editor | Nonfiction Book Proposals

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Prolific ghostwriter of 40 published books, translated into over a dozen languages. Looking for potential best selling books.

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Versatile, reliable award-winning ghostwriter who has written, edited or developed more than twenty books covering many nonfiction genres.

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Your voice is my guiding force. Only you can write your book, and it needs to be as distinct as you are.

research paper ghostwriters

Veteran journalist/book author/ghostwriter with solid but tender editorial skills will make your words and story sing.

What if I’ve written most of my book already?

Some ghostwriters will also accept unfinished manuscripts, and work with the author to write the missing parts. Such a job usually requires a mix of developmental editing (to restructure the book) and ghostwriting, and can be just as time-consuming for the ghostwriter as writing the book from the outset.

How to find a ghostwriter

First, you should be looking for someone familiar with the subject of your book, and who is willing to spend the time to get to know your vision for the project.

You also need to find someone whose personality gels with yours, and whose style appeals to you. Get a sense both of their writing style (by reading what they’ve written already) and of their personality (by arranging face-to-face interviews when possible). Communication is absolutely key when reaching out to prospective ghostwriters, to ensure you make the best decision for your book.

It is important that you feel completely safe from the get-go, and ready to entrust the ghostwriter with the inner secrets of your story. Choose someone you’re confident will do your story justice.

What is the process of working with a ghostwriter?

Once you’re set on a ghostwriter, there are several ways to start the collaboration. The most common one is to sit down with them (figuratively, or in real life), and have them record your story. Andrew Crofts, one of the ghostwriters on Reedsy, gives a good idea of what the process should look like:

“In an ideal world you will spend a few days recording before the ghost goes away to write the first draft. You will meet up again, tell them if they are going wrong and put right anything that they have misunderstood, or that you forgot to tell them at the first meetings. They will then produce a final version.”

In reality, the process can of course be longer, and require more back-and-forth before you get to this final version. You can also ask your ghostwriter to share the chapters with you as they write them — though that should be made clear from the start.

In the end, it’s all about keeping an open and honest communication to make sure you are both on the same line.

Why should I trust Reedsy ghostwriters?

Like all of the professionals on the marketplace, Reedsy ghostwriters have been carefully hand-picked by our staff from thousands of applicants. We have done all the background checks for you to ensure the ghostwriters on our website are veteran professionals with an established reputation.

They are used to working with publishers, agents, and first-time authors alike, so they will be able to help guide you through the entire process.

How much does it cost?

Reedsy allows professionals to set their own fees. Once a year, we analyze the data from our marketplace and make it public in a blog post. Click here to learn more .

What clauses should I check for in a ghostwriting contract?

Confidentiality: All standard ghostwriting contracts contain a non-disclosure agreement, preventing the ghostwriter from revealing any information about the book and contract to any third party.

Copyright : The contract should attribute all intellectual property of the ghostwritten book to you (usually pending full payment), unless you intend to make the ghostwriter a “co-author” of the book.

Payment and royalties: When commissioned by publishers or agents, ghostwriters are often remunerated through a fixed fee and a percentage of future royalties from book sales. If you’re an independent author however, it will be nearly impossible to convince a professional ghostwriter to work with you on a royalty-share model (unless you’re a celebrity of course).

Termination clause: Ghostwriting projects can be complex, and don’t always go exactly according to plan. A ghostwriting contract will usually include a provision for more work, as well as a termination clause with a “kill fee” should you decide to part ways.

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Ghostwriting college research paper service is a special form of academic writing where students hire professional writing services to create academic or scientific texts or papers on their behalf. This means that the academic ghostwriters are experts and have enough writing experience within students’ particular disciplines.

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We offer 100% legal quality services with strict confidentiality. Our ghostwriters work by offering academic assistance to our clients. Just like an instructor helps their students learn and understand the writing process, we come in and offer similar services at student-friendly prices. Our quality services are strictly confidential to ensure that our clients are not exposed or their information is shared with other people. If our clients are not satisfied or their custom written research papers fall below their expectations, we guarantee money back.

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Why College Students Hire Ghostwriters for their Papers

1. professional papers.

Ghostwriters are professionals and experts in their fields of study. Therefore, their papers are tailor-made according to the instructions and specifications provided by the student.

They are error-free, plagiarism-free, and use the latest and most acceptable writing styles, referencing, and formatting methods.

As are result, college students are guaranteed of scoring the best grades hence the reason why they hire writers for their papers.

2. Too much Homework

College students also hire writers for their papers because of time pressures and high stress in college. The study process exerts a lot of pressure on college students and most of them can be overwhelmed.

While in college, students are required to take and complete several course units within a short period. Worse still, educational institutions and parents expect students to pass the courses with no lateness.

Those courses require them to come up with research papers and instructors expect the students to submit quality papers. As a result, some students will opt to hire professional writers to help.

3. To manage Busy Schedule

Again, college students have busy personal lives. They may have part-time or full-time jobs to sustain their lives and finance their academic pursuits.

Because of this, they will not have enough time to do their research papers and submit them on time. Therefore, they hire professional writers to do their papers.

4. Lack of writing skills

While most students have the knowledge and know the content of a paper, they have challenges in writing skills.

To solve this hurdle, they turn to essay writing services for ghostwriters to help them. In fact, we have seen a greater percentage of customers write the points they want to see in the paper. The ghost writer takes the task to make it real in excellent writing skills that the student lacks

5. Pressure to get Grades

Another reason why college students hire writers for their papers is because of family or personal pressure to achieve good results in college.

The education system is very competitive. Students have to prove that they are good learners by performing well.

The act of trying to prove to themselves and others that they are good learners results in a lot of academic pressures that force them to seek professional writing services for their research papers.

As long as they will not get caught or suspected, their peers, parents, and instructors will commend them for their exemplary performance.

In situations where college students are required to attain a certain minimum grade or threshold to achieve something, let’s say a once in a lifetime internship or a job placement, they will be forced to hire writers for their papers to avoid missing an opportunity.

6. Lack of Motivation to write

Another important reason why college students hire writers for their papers is due to a lack of motivation. Many times, colleges fail to give students the proper motivation for writing research papers.

Consequently, students do not find a viable reason why they are required to undergo a strenuous or stressful research and writing process to create a paper. To avoid this, they hire professional writing services despite the ethical concerns that surround academic ghostwriting.

7. Language challenges

Distance learning or studying using a second language is another reason why college students hire writers for their papers. This is a genuine challenge that faces international students.

Online learning allows college students to take their exams and tests remotely. This provides an opportunity to hire writers who do those tests and exams on their behalf.

Studying in a second language can be very difficult for some students. This is because academic writing requires a proper understanding of the second language. Because of this, students will hire a writer.

Tips for Hiring a Good Ghostwriter to write your essays and Papers – the Do’s

1. know the best website with the quality writers.

best academic ghostwriting website

The first thing to hire a good ghostwriter is to know the best sites to search for professional writers.

This is not an easy task because there are several sites and platforms out there claiming to provide professional writing services but fail to deliver as promised. It is with this point in mind that we created Grade Bees as a website with the best academic writers in the market.

Again, professional ghostwriting sites maintain a low profile because they cannot share students’ confidential information. Therefore, conduct thorough research to find the best site. The best way to know that a platform or site provides good ghostwriting services is through their ratings and the number of satisfied customers.

2. Accurately asses Ghostwriter’s ability

Academic ghostwriter at work

Assessing the skill level of the ghostwriter can also help when searching for a good ghostwriter. Once you have identified the best platform or site for ghostwriting services and defined your project goals, the support team will find the best ghostwriter for your project.

It is important to assess the ghostwriter’s skills by reviewing their rating and customer satisfaction levels. A good ghostwriter will be highly rated and a significant number of customers will be satisfied. Again, compare their professional skill-sets to your project goals.

If your project goal is to come up with a research paper in the field of biological sciences, it is best to find a ghostwriter who specializes in the discipline. Experience matters. The best academic ghostwriters are those who have gained a lot of professional experience.

3. Select fully available writers

Another tip to hire a good ghostwriter is to determine their availability. A good academic ghostwriter will be available 24-7 depending on your demands. When ordering our research paper writing services , we insist that each client will get custom written research papers. Therefore, students have to define their project goals and

It is important to hire a ghostwriter who, using the appropriate channels, can communicate with you concerning the project. A good ghostwriter will respond to your requests on time and seek clarification from you when necessary. They should also use the polite and professional communication style. 

The Don’ts in Ghostwriting – How to not get Caught that Someone Wrote your Paper

1. read the paper.

The first tip to avoid getting caught that you used someone to write your paper is to read it. After receiving the completed paper, it is important to go through it. This is because ghostwriting sites or platforms hire professional writers with postgraduate degrees.

Such ghostwriters will have a vast knowledge of the discipline and therefore may include intricate information than may raise suspicion. This especially applies to students who are not used to getting good grades. Go through the paper and attune it to your level.

2. Revise the Paper to your level of writing

Attuning the custom-written college paper to your level brings in another tip. You should add a few mistakes to show that you have written the paper. Good academic ghostwriters create high-quality papers that guarantee high grades. If you are an average student, submitting such a paper will raise suspicion. It is best to add some mistakes into the paper to dampen it.

3. Scan the Paper for Plagiarism

Another important tip to avoid getting caught is to always check the uniqueness of your custom-written paper after receiving it. Several academic ghostwriting services claim to produce plagiarism-free papers. This is not always the case because several cheap academic writing services will sell you plagiarized papers . It is important to check the received papers to avoid plagiarized work. Finally, proofread your work to ensure that all the details are followed.

With all said and done, college students are hiring professional academic ghostwriters to complete their research papers. They do so because of the aforementioned reasons. Though this is the case, the papers are of high quality hence guaranteeing the best grades. An academic writing service like ours ensures that You can give it a try and see your academic performance flourish. It’s 100% legal.

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  • Threat intelligence
  • Microsoft Copilot for Security
  • Threat actors

Staying ahead of threat actors in the age of AI

  • By Microsoft Threat Intelligence
  • AI and machine learning
  • Attacker techniques, tools, and infrastructure
  • Social engineering / phishing
  • Forest Blizzard (STRONTIUM)
  • MITRE ATT&CK
  • Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)

Over the last year, the speed, scale, and sophistication of attacks has increased alongside the rapid development and adoption of AI. Defenders are only beginning to recognize and apply the power of generative AI to shift the cybersecurity balance in their favor and keep ahead of adversaries. At the same time, it is also important for us to understand how AI can be potentially misused in the hands of threat actors. In collaboration with OpenAI, today we are publishing research on emerging threats in the age of AI, focusing on identified activity associated with known threat actors, including prompt-injections, attempted misuse of large language models (LLM), and fraud. Our analysis of the current use of LLM technology by threat actors revealed behaviors consistent with attackers using AI as another productivity tool on the offensive landscape. You can read OpenAI’s blog on the research here . Microsoft and OpenAI have not yet observed particularly novel or unique AI-enabled attack or abuse techniques resulting from threat actors’ usage of AI. However, Microsoft and our partners continue to study this landscape closely.

The objective of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, including the release of this research, is to ensure the safe and responsible use of AI technologies like ChatGPT, upholding the highest standards of ethical application to protect the community from potential misuse. As part of this commitment, we have taken measures to disrupt assets and accounts associated with threat actors, improve the protection of OpenAI LLM technology and users from attack or abuse, and shape the guardrails and safety mechanisms around our models. In addition, we are also deeply committed to using generative AI to disrupt threat actors and leverage the power of new tools, including Microsoft Copilot for Security , to elevate defenders everywhere.

A principled approach to detecting and blocking threat actors

The progress of technology creates a demand for strong cybersecurity and safety measures. For example, the White House’s Executive Order on AI requires rigorous safety testing and government supervision for AI systems that have major impacts on national and economic security or public health and safety. Our actions enhancing the safeguards of our AI models and partnering with our ecosystem on the safe creation, implementation, and use of these models align with the Executive Order’s request for comprehensive AI safety and security standards.

In line with Microsoft’s leadership across AI and cybersecurity, today we are announcing principles shaping Microsoft’s policy and actions mitigating the risks associated with the use of our AI tools and APIs by nation-state advanced persistent threats (APTs), advanced persistent manipulators (APMs), and cybercriminal syndicates we track.

These principles include:   

  • Identification and action against malicious threat actors’ use: Upon detection of the use of any Microsoft AI application programming interfaces (APIs), services, or systems by an identified malicious threat actor, including nation-state APT or APM, or the cybercrime syndicates we track, Microsoft will take appropriate action to disrupt their activities, such as disabling the accounts used, terminating services, or limiting access to resources.           
  • Notification to other AI service providers: When we detect a threat actor’s use of another service provider’s AI, AI APIs, services, and/or systems, Microsoft will promptly notify the service provider and share relevant data. This enables the service provider to independently verify our findings and take action in accordance with their own policies.
  • Collaboration with other stakeholders: Microsoft will collaborate with other stakeholders to regularly exchange information about detected threat actors’ use of AI. This collaboration aims to promote collective, consistent, and effective responses to ecosystem-wide risks.
  • Transparency: As part of our ongoing efforts to advance responsible use of AI, Microsoft will inform the public and stakeholders about actions taken under these threat actor principles, including the nature and extent of threat actors’ use of AI detected within our systems and the measures taken against them, as appropriate.

Microsoft remains committed to responsible AI innovation, prioritizing the safety and integrity of our technologies with respect for human rights and ethical standards. These principles announced today build on Microsoft’s Responsible AI practices , our voluntary commitments to advance responsible AI innovation and the Azure OpenAI Code of Conduct . We are following these principles as part of our broader commitments to strengthening international law and norms and to advance the goals of the Bletchley Declaration endorsed by 29 countries.

Microsoft and OpenAI’s complementary defenses protect AI platforms

Because Microsoft and OpenAI’s partnership extends to security, the companies can take action when known and emerging threat actors surface. Microsoft Threat Intelligence tracks more than 300 unique threat actors, including 160 nation-state actors, 50 ransomware groups, and many others. These adversaries employ various digital identities and attack infrastructures. Microsoft’s experts and automated systems continually analyze and correlate these attributes, uncovering attackers’ efforts to evade detection or expand their capabilities by leveraging new technologies. Consistent with preventing threat actors’ actions across our technologies and working closely with partners, Microsoft continues to study threat actors’ use of AI and LLMs, partner with OpenAI to monitor attack activity, and apply what we learn to continually improve defenses. This blog provides an overview of observed activities collected from known threat actor infrastructure as identified by Microsoft Threat Intelligence, then shared with OpenAI to identify potential malicious use or abuse of their platform and protect our mutual customers from future threats or harm.

Recognizing the rapid growth of AI and emergent use of LLMs in cyber operations, we continue to work with MITRE to integrate these LLM-themed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) into the MITRE ATT&CK® framework or MITRE ATLAS™ (Adversarial Threat Landscape for Artificial-Intelligence Systems) knowledgebase. This strategic expansion reflects a commitment to not only track and neutralize threats, but also to pioneer the development of countermeasures in the evolving landscape of AI-powered cyber operations. A full list of the LLM-themed TTPs, which include those we identified during our investigations, is summarized in the appendix.

Summary of Microsoft and OpenAI’s findings and threat intelligence

The threat ecosystem over the last several years has revealed a consistent theme of threat actors following trends in technology in parallel with their defender counterparts. Threat actors, like defenders, are looking at AI, including LLMs, to enhance their productivity and take advantage of accessible platforms that could advance their objectives and attack techniques. Cybercrime groups, nation-state threat actors, and other adversaries are exploring and testing different AI technologies as they emerge, in an attempt to understand potential value to their operations and the security controls they may need to circumvent. On the defender side, hardening these same security controls from attacks and implementing equally sophisticated monitoring that anticipates and blocks malicious activity is vital.

While different threat actors’ motives and complexity vary, they have common tasks to perform in the course of targeting and attacks. These include reconnaissance, such as learning about potential victims’ industries, locations, and relationships; help with coding, including improving things like software scripts and malware development; and assistance with learning and using native languages. Language support is a natural feature of LLMs and is attractive for threat actors with continuous focus on social engineering and other techniques relying on false, deceptive communications tailored to their targets’ jobs, professional networks, and other relationships.

Importantly, our research with OpenAI has not identified significant attacks employing the LLMs we monitor closely. At the same time, we feel this is important research to publish to expose early-stage, incremental moves that we observe well-known threat actors attempting, and share information on how we are blocking and countering them with the defender community.

While attackers will remain interested in AI and probe technologies’ current capabilities and security controls, it’s important to keep these risks in context. As always, hygiene practices such as multifactor authentication (MFA ) and Zero Trust defenses are essential because attackers may use AI-based tools to improve their existing cyberattacks that rely on social engineering and finding unsecured devices and accounts.

The threat actors profiled below are a sample of observed activity we believe best represents the TTPs the industry will need to better track using MITRE ATT&CK® framework or MITRE ATLAS™ knowledgebase updates.

Forest Blizzard 

Forest Blizzard (STRONTIUM) is a Russian military intelligence actor linked to GRU Unit 26165, who has targeted victims of both tactical and strategic interest to the Russian government. Their activities span across a variety of sectors including defense, transportation/logistics, government, energy, non-governmental organizations (NGO), and information technology. Forest Blizzard has been extremely active in targeting organizations in and related to Russia’s war in Ukraine throughout the duration of the conflict, and Microsoft assesses that Forest Blizzard operations play a significant supporting role to Russia’s foreign policy and military objectives both in Ukraine and in the broader international community. Forest Blizzard overlaps with the threat actor tracked by other researchers as APT28 and Fancy Bear.

Forest Blizzard’s use of LLMs has involved research into various satellite and radar technologies that may pertain to conventional military operations in Ukraine, as well as generic research aimed at supporting their cyber operations. Based on these observations, we map and classify these TTPs using the following descriptions:

  • LLM-informed reconnaissance: Interacting with LLMs to understand satellite communication protocols, radar imaging technologies, and specific technical parameters. These queries suggest an attempt to acquire in-depth knowledge of satellite capabilities.
  • LLM-enhanced scripting techniques: Seeking assistance in basic scripting tasks, including file manipulation, data selection, regular expressions, and multiprocessing, to potentially automate or optimize technical operations.

Similar to Salmon Typhoon’s LLM interactions, Microsoft observed engagement from Forest Blizzard that were representative of an adversary exploring the use cases of a new technology. As with other adversaries, all accounts and assets associated with Forest Blizzard have been disabled.

Emerald Sleet

Emerald Sleet (THALLIUM) is a North Korean threat actor that has remained highly active throughout 2023. Their recent operations relied on spear-phishing emails to compromise and gather intelligence from prominent individuals with expertise on North Korea. Microsoft observed Emerald Sleet impersonating reputable academic institutions and NGOs to lure victims into replying with expert insights and commentary about foreign policies related to North Korea. Emerald Sleet overlaps with threat actors tracked by other researchers as Kimsuky and Velvet Chollima.

Emerald Sleet’s use of LLMs has been in support of this activity and involved research into think tanks and experts on North Korea, as well as the generation of content likely to be used in spear-phishing campaigns. Emerald Sleet also interacted with LLMs to understand publicly known vulnerabilities, to troubleshoot technical issues, and for assistance with using various web technologies. Based on these observations, we map and classify these TTPs using the following descriptions:

  • LLM-assisted vulnerability research: Interacting with LLMs to better understand publicly reported vulnerabilities, such as the CVE-2022-30190 Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) vulnerability (known as “Follina”).
  • LLM-enhanced scripting techniques : Using LLMs for basic scripting tasks such as programmatically identifying certain user events on a system and seeking assistance with troubleshooting and understanding various web technologies.
  • LLM-supported social engineering: Using LLMs for assistance with the drafting and generation of content that would likely be for use in spear-phishing campaigns against individuals with regional expertise.
  • LLM-informed reconnaissance: Interacting with LLMs to identify think tanks, government organizations, or experts on North Korea that have a focus on defense issues or North Korea’s nuclear weapon’s program.

All accounts and assets associated with Emerald Sleet have been disabled.

Crimson Sandstorm

Crimson Sandstorm (CURIUM) is an Iranian threat actor assessed to be connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Active since at least 2017, Crimson Sandstorm has targeted multiple sectors, including defense, maritime shipping, transportation, healthcare, and technology. These operations have frequently relied on watering hole attacks and social engineering to deliver custom .NET malware. Prior research also identified custom Crimson Sandstorm malware using email-based command-and-control (C2) channels. Crimson Sandstorm overlaps with the threat actor tracked by other researchers as Tortoiseshell, Imperial Kitten, and Yellow Liderc.

The use of LLMs by Crimson Sandstorm has reflected the broader behaviors that the security community has observed from this threat actor. Interactions have involved requests for support around social engineering, assistance in troubleshooting errors, .NET development, and ways in which an attacker might evade detection when on a compromised machine. Based on these observations, we map and classify these TTPs using the following descriptions:

  • LLM-supported social engineering: Interacting with LLMs to generate various phishing emails, including one pretending to come from an international development agency and another attempting to lure prominent feminists to an attacker-built website on feminism. 
  • LLM-enhanced scripting techniques : Using LLMs to generate code snippets that appear intended to support app and web development, interactions with remote servers, web scraping, executing tasks when users sign in, and sending information from a system via email.
  • LLM-enhanced anomaly detection evasion: Attempting to use LLMs for assistance in developing code to evade detection, to learn how to disable antivirus via registry or Windows policies, and to delete files in a directory after an application has been closed.

All accounts and assets associated with Crimson Sandstorm have been disabled.

Charcoal Typhoon

Charcoal Typhoon (CHROMIUM) is a Chinese state-affiliated threat actor with a broad operational scope. They are known for targeting sectors that include government, higher education, communications infrastructure, oil & gas, and information technology. Their activities have predominantly focused on entities within Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, Malaysia, France, and Nepal, with observed interests extending to institutions and individuals globally who oppose China’s policies. Charcoal Typhoon overlaps with the threat actor tracked by other researchers as Aquatic Panda, ControlX, RedHotel, and BRONZE UNIVERSITY.

In recent operations, Charcoal Typhoon has been observed interacting with LLMs in ways that suggest a limited exploration of how LLMs can augment their technical operations. This has consisted of using LLMs to support tooling development, scripting, understanding various commodity cybersecurity tools, and for generating content that could be used to social engineer targets. Based on these observations, we map and classify these TTPs using the following descriptions:

  • LLM-informed reconnaissance : Engaging LLMs to research and understand specific technologies, platforms, and vulnerabilities, indicative of preliminary information-gathering stages.
  • LLM-enhanced scripting techniques : Utilizing LLMs to generate and refine scripts, potentially to streamline and automate complex cyber tasks and operations.
  • LLM-supported social engineering : Leveraging LLMs for assistance with translations and communication, likely to establish connections or manipulate targets.
  • LLM-refined operational command techniques : Utilizing LLMs for advanced commands, deeper system access, and control representative of post-compromise behavior.

All associated accounts and assets of Charcoal Typhoon have been disabled, reaffirming our commitment to safeguarding against the misuse of AI technologies.

Salmon Typhoon

Salmon Typhoon (SODIUM) is a sophisticated Chinese state-affiliated threat actor with a history of targeting US defense contractors, government agencies, and entities within the cryptographic technology sector. This threat actor has demonstrated its capabilities through the deployment of malware, such as Win32/Wkysol, to maintain remote access to compromised systems. With over a decade of operations marked by intermittent periods of dormancy and resurgence, Salmon Typhoon has recently shown renewed activity. Salmon Typhoon overlaps with the threat actor tracked by other researchers as APT4 and Maverick Panda.

Notably, Salmon Typhoon’s interactions with LLMs throughout 2023 appear exploratory and suggest that this threat actor is evaluating the effectiveness of LLMs in sourcing information on potentially sensitive topics, high profile individuals, regional geopolitics, US influence, and internal affairs. This tentative engagement with LLMs could reflect both a broadening of their intelligence-gathering toolkit and an experimental phase in assessing the capabilities of emerging technologies.

Based on these observations, we map and classify these TTPs using the following descriptions:

  • LLM-informed reconnaissance: Engaging LLMs for queries on a diverse array of subjects, such as global intelligence agencies, domestic concerns, notable individuals, cybersecurity matters, topics of strategic interest, and various threat actors. These interactions mirror the use of a search engine for public domain research.
  • LLM-enhanced scripting techniques: Using LLMs to identify and resolve coding errors. Requests for support in developing code with potential malicious intent were observed by Microsoft, and it was noted that the model adhered to established ethical guidelines, declining to provide such assistance.
  • LLM-refined operational command techniques: Demonstrating an interest in specific file types and concealment tactics within operating systems, indicative of an effort to refine operational command execution.
  • LLM-aided technical translation and explanation: Leveraging LLMs for the translation of computing terms and technical papers.

Salmon Typhoon’s engagement with LLMs aligns with patterns observed by Microsoft, reflecting traditional behaviors in a new technological arena. In response, all accounts and assets associated with Salmon Typhoon have been disabled.

In closing, AI technologies will continue to evolve and be studied by various threat actors. Microsoft will continue to track threat actors and malicious activity misusing LLMs, and work with OpenAI and other partners to share intelligence, improve protections for customers and aid the broader security community.

Appendix: LLM-themed TTPs

Using insights from our analysis above, as well as other potential misuse of AI, we’re sharing the below list of LLM-themed TTPs that we map and classify to the MITRE ATT&CK® framework or MITRE ATLAS™ knowledgebase to equip the community with a common taxonomy to collectively track malicious use of LLMs and create countermeasures against:

  • LLM-informed reconnaissance: Employing LLMs to gather actionable intelligence on technologies and potential vulnerabilities.
  • LLM-enhanced scripting techniques: Utilizing LLMs to generate or refine scripts that could be used in cyberattacks, or for basic scripting tasks such as programmatically identifying certain user events on a system and assistance with troubleshooting and understanding various web technologies.
  • LLM-aided development : Utilizing LLMs in the development lifecycle of tools and programs, including those with malicious intent, such as malware.
  • LLM-assisted vulnerability research : Using LLMs to understand and identify potential vulnerabilities in software and systems, which could be targeted for exploitation.
  • LLM-optimized payload crafting : Using LLMs to assist in creating and refining payloads for deployment in cyberattacks.
  • LLM-enhanced anomaly detection evasion : Leveraging LLMs to develop methods that help malicious activities blend in with normal behavior or traffic to evade detection systems.
  • LLM-directed security feature bypass : Using LLMs to find ways to circumvent security features, such as two-factor authentication, CAPTCHA, or other access controls.
  • LLM-advised resource development : Using LLMs in tool development, tool modifications, and strategic operational planning.

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COMMENTS

  1. Ghostwriters in the scientific world

    These ghostwriters are often attached to the medical publishing houses and are involved in writing an article for a pharmaceutical company which may, in turn, use the name of an established or a famous scientist as an author to the article. Often, such articles are published in well-known journals and are circulating widely.

  2. Ghostwriting in academic journals: How can we mitigate its ...

    Ghostwriting is a term used to describe academic research written by someone whose name is not acknowledged. The third party may be anyone who engages in this behavior, including individuals hired by private companies in the industry that may provide undisclosed influence on research.

  3. Understanding Ghostwriting and Ghost Authorship As Problems of Research

    Ghostwriting is a serious problem of research integrity; however, its true impact remains unclear, and little concrete advice is available on how to avoid it. Ongoing discussions and engagement are needed by all authors and contributors to research publications.

  4. (PDF) Ghostwriters in the scientific world

    Ghostwriting is not only present in pharmaceutical articles, but also in academia. [164] is shadow management can lead to various frauds such as: highlighting only the positive aspects of the drug;...

  5. Ghostwriting: The Dirty Little Secret of Medical Publishing That Just

    PLoS Medicine became involved in this particular ghostwriting story when we intervened in an ongoing court case [1] in which women were suing Wyeth, the manufacturers of Prempro, a hormone replacement therapy. During the discovery process for this case, one of the lawyers representing injured women in the litigation, Jim Szaller of Cleveland ...

  6. A close encounter with ghost-writers: an initial exploration study on

    Academic dishonesty presents in different forms, including fabrication of data, falsifying references, multiple submissions, collusion, and sabotage, with two forms haunting academia, namely plagiarism and contract cheating or ghost writing. These latter forms have received considerable attention and have been subjects for research. This interview-based study provides some further insight into ...

  7. 5 Effective Ways to Avoid Ghostwriting for Busy Researchers

    Research has become global and with interdisciplinary and collaborative researches on the go, it is essential to stay updated. 5. Mendeley. This tool manages references. Mendeley is a reference manager tool that helps researchers organize relevant references for their research paper. This tool helps organize your citations and research.

  8. Fake research papers flagged by analysing authorship trends

    A research-technology firm has developed a new approach to help identify journal articles that originate from paper mills — companies that churn out fake or poor-quality studies and sell ...

  9. Opinion: Exorcising Ghostwriting from Peer Review

    As defined in that paper, peer review ghostwriting occurs when scientists hand over manuscripts that they have agreed to review for journal editors to graduate students or postdocs in their research groups. ... The potential for exploitation of graduate student and postdoc ghostwriters and co-reviewers is certainly a good reason for concern and ...

  10. Ghostwriters in the Medical Literature

    Ghost authorship occurs when an unacknowledged author writes, or makes substantial contributions to, an article published in the peer-reviewed science literature. Typically, the author is a professional writer with scientific expertise, hired by medical-education and communications companies.

  11. Medical ghostwriter

    Medical ghostwriters are employed by pharmaceutical companies and medical-device manufacturers to produce apparently independent manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals, conference presentations and other communications. Physicians and other scientists are paid to attach their names to the manuscripts as though they had authored them. [1]

  12. Ghostwriters Emerge From the Shadows

    Ghostwriters Emerge From the Shadows. Practitioners of the solitary and highly secretive profession got together to compare notes and celebrate their work. 16. Madeleine Morel, an agent that works ...

  13. China conducts first nationwide review of retractions and research

    More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record. According to Nature's analysis, which includes only English-language journals, ...

  14. The Power of Research Techniques for Ghostwriters

    Research is vital for crafting captivating content in the realm of ghostwriting. However, ghostwriters need help absorbing much information while ensuring credibility. It requires critical...

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    Our service provides all kinds of papers, starting with ghost writing college essays and ending with graduate papers. However, the prices at AdvancedWriters.com are now set to the industry average, which means that research papers are always affordable. The prices for ghostwritten papers do not include the conduction of a primary research.

  17. A once-ignored community of science sleuths now has the research

    A community of sleuths hunting for errors in scientific research have sent shockwaves through some of the most prestigious research institutions in the world — and the science community at large.

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  27. PDF Keyframer: Empowering Animation Design using Large Language Models

    In this paper, we explore how the emerging technology of large language models can assist exploration and refinement in animation design. 3 FORMATIVE STUDY We conducted a formative interview study to answer our research question •RQ1: What painpoints exist for motion designers, and what ideas do they have for how AI might assist with these ...

  28. Staying ahead of threat actors in the age of AI

    Microsoft, in collaboration with OpenAI, is publishing research on emerging threats in the age of AI, focusing on identified activity associated with known threat actors Forest Blizzard, Emerald Sleet, Crimson Sandstorm, and others. The observed activity includes prompt-injections, attempted misuse of large language models (LLM), and fraud.