Paper mills are charging almost $800 (£592) for a typical ghostwritten paper, the first major global study of the shadow publishing industry has found.

Drawing on more than 18,000 advertisements posted by seven businesses operating in seven countries, researchers identified a total of 5,567 unique products for sale, ranging from first authorship on a Scopus-indexed paper or being the sole author of an “international textbook” to the registration of design patents in the UK, India or Canada.

Other products available for sale over the past six years included authorship positions on conference proceeding articles linked to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-run events, with Indian firms charging between $60 and $140 for a first author credit on this type of paper.

For a lead author credit on an academic article the cost is between $57 and $5,631, with a median price of $788, according to the study co-authored by Reese Richardson and Spencer Hong at Northwestern University and Anna Abalkina from Free University of Berlin.

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For a fifth-placed authorship position on a paper the median cost advertised is $420, finds the study published on the preprint server  on 22 April.

Collating Telegram and other social media adverts posted by businesses in seven countries (India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Latvia and Ukraine), the results represent the most comprehensive data set on the prices charged by paper mills globally so far, the study explains.

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In many cases, papers mills advertise authorship slots in journals run by international publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley, although these products “often do not appear in the same venue that was initially advertised”, the paper notes.

That prices differ “considerably between businesses and countries”, are tailored to the income level of each business’ targeted clientele and “fluctuate considerably over time” suggest paper mills are “endlessly adaptable” in targeting customers, said lead author Richardson, postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern’s Center for Science of Science and Innovation who focuses on research integrity issues.

Neither growing efforts to crack down on research fraud nor the advent of generative artificial intelligence, which has made it easier for scholars to write academic papers themselves, have dampened appetite for the services of paper mills, he argued.

“There is a lot of money to be made in the market for academic reputation manipulation – jobs and funding are scarce, academia remains hypercompetitive and there are still very light and very infrequent consequences for participating in the market, both for individuals and institutions,” said Richardson, whose  estimated that only about 25 per cent of paper mill products will ever be retracted.

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“This is probably quite a lot higher than the actual number [who are caught] since we were relying on paper mill products that have actually been detected. We have no idea what is actually out there,” he said.

“Even if circumstances change, businesses do not go away overnight,” said Richardson. “As we’ve seen many times before, and as a couple of paper mills that we describe here have demonstrated, paper mills are endlessly adaptable.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com