January 16, 2010

Ghost Writers in the Sky

Just another thing to keep my teacher senses up in the classroom, especially if I ever assign a paper to my students. (After dealing with this my first semester teaching, I vowed to never assign a term paper again. We’ll see if I hold firm to that or not.)

Chinese academia ghost-writing 'widespread'1 (January 5, 2010, BBC News)
More than $100m (£63m) changes hands in China every year for ghost-written academic papers, according to research by a Chinese university.The study, by Wuhan University, says Chinese academics and students often buy and sell scientific papers to swell publications lists. Many of the purported authors never write the papers they sign. China ranks second behind the United States by number of academic papers published every year. The market in buying and selling scientific papers has grown five-fold in the past three years. Some hard-up masters or doctorate students are making a living by churning out papers for others. Others mass-produce scientific papers in order to get monetary rewards from their institutions. Two lecturers from central China were sacked late last month after it was discovered that they had falsified 70 papers in two years.

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1 ZGBriefs for January 7, 2010

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Remember the CG's in all comments. Thanks for checking in on the work in China!