The average cost of buying the first-author slot on a scientific publication that has nothing to do with you is just over $1,030, according to a new analysis of social media advertisements by major brokers of fraudulent scientific papers. But the figure can vary drastically among service providers and the position of author slots, the study finds.
The analysis, submitted to the scientific paper archive arXiv, examines close to 19,000 advertisements from between 2020 and 2026 on Telegram, Facebook, and WhatsApp as well as the websites of brokers of scientific fraud.
The ads were posted by paper mills, which are shady companies and dubious entities known to sell authorship slots and citations on plagiarized, nonsensical, or fabricated papers.
They operate in part by bribing journal editors and exploiting publisher waiver policies designed for researchers working in war-torn regions and developing countries. To sell author slots, these firms usually post ads after studies are in the pipeline to be published in a scholarly journal.
Dubious distinction
Elsevier leads among academic publishers named in advertisements for journal authorships.
Source: BuyTheBy, a dataset of 18,710 text-based paper mill advertisements with 51,812 time-stamped prices.
Credit: Shea Murphy/C&EN.
For the new analysis, the study authors examined ads released by seven paper mills, focusing on the firms whose communications are in English. They operate from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Latvia, India, and Iraq, the analysis says.
While five of the seven paper mills studied focus on selling authorship slots on academic papers, the firms run out of India and Ukraine also offer other services, including authorship slots on textbooks, editorship positions on textbooks, and investorship positions on patents.
The analysis examined almost 52,000 time-stamped prices of author slots from nearly 19,000 different advertisements selling more than 5,500 unique products, but it just scratches the surface of this type of fraudulent activity, the authors say. “That’s still a fraction of a fraction of what’s actually out there,” says study coauthor Reese Richardson, who is a biologist at Northwestern University and a well-known research-integrity sleuth.
While prices vary across services, the cost of buying the first-authorship slot is on average cheapest at the firm run out of India and most expensive at the Russia-based one.
“It’s often assumed that first author positions will be sold at higher values than subsequent author positions, but the data suggest that this might not apply across all paper mills,” Jennifer Byrne, an oncologist at the University of Sydney who has collaborated with Richardson in the past but wasn’t involved with the new study, writes in an email. “This is a surprising finding, suggesting that for at least some paper mill clients, being any author may be more important than being first.”
Although Byrne notes that the study’s methods are “clearly described and seem sound,” she would have liked more analysis of trends over time. “It would be interesting to see whether mentions of publishers and journals have changed over time, which could reflect particular venues closing their doors through improved screening or awareness,” she writes. “It would also be interesting to compare advertisement contents pre and post late 2022, when text generation tools became more accessible.”
Even though generative artificial intelligence is making it easier for researchers to create their own shoddy papers, it’s likely that authors looking to cut corners will continue to use the paper-mill services, Jana Christopher, image-data-integrity analyst at the scientific publisher FEBS Press, says by email. That’s because the mills are covering the “full breadth of services around submission, correspondence, interloping on the review process, covering revision, proof stage, and even post-publication correspondence,” she notes. “A person who needs a paper, and many of the customers are first-time authors with little experience in publishing, might feel that it makes sense to leave navigating all this potentially complex labyrinth to the ‘professionals’.”
While paper-mill ads don’t usually mention which journal the paper will eventually be published in, they do sometimes mention the name of the publisher that runs it. Out of the 474 ads in the analysis that did mention the publisher being targeted, the publishing giant Elsevier was mentioned the most, in 112 ads, followed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), in 101 ads, and Springer Nature, in 86. The Royal Society of Chemistry featured in 7 ads.
“That’s still a fraction of a fraction of what’s actually out there.”
Reese Richardson, biologist and research-integrity sleuth, Northwestern University
What the ads mention more often are the indexing databases that host the journal in question, because researchers in many countries require publications to be in certain indexed journals to meet criteria for hiring, promotions, and career progression. More than 12,000 of the ads studied mention the database Scopus, which is run by Elsevier, and over 5,000 cite Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Christopher says it’s worrying that ads explicitly mention indexing services and publishers as “it indicates insufficient protection and even potential infiltration/collaboration from individuals on the publisher side who are in a position to aid the publishing success of paper mill products.”
While in the past, indexing databases have taken action by deindexing titles found to be associated with paper mills, the firms seem to quickly move to other journals and continue their operations. According to a 2025 analysis coauthored by Richardson, Byrne, and others, paper mills are large, resilient, and growing rapidly.
Anna Abalkina, a social scientist at the Free University of Berlin and a coauthor of the new analysis, says many paper mills have contracts with authors who use their services. These contracts openly declare that the mill will sell them authorship slots in exchange for money, she notes. In the past, Abalkina has matched paper-mill ads to journal papers that are eventually published, but the authors of the new study didn’t set out to do this for every paper in their dataset.
Since the study was completed, two publishers have asked Richardson for access to the data to figure out which of their manuscripts may have stemmed from paper mills. Richardson declines to name the publishers but says he hopes releasing the dataset—which the authors dub BuyTheBy—publicly will attract attention to the issue.
Richardson says he’s in dozens of social media channels and groups run by paper mills and will continue to monitor new ads and add them to the dataset. He hopes other research-integrity experts will also contribute. “There are huge markets for paper mill products in Iran and China,” he notes, “but they’re missing from this dataset.”
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