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IME, and as the article also kind of says: paper mills target academics from developing countries. Academics who have trouble competing because of lack of funds, or lack of proper support from their universities, language barriers, cultural barriers, etc.

As you mention, being in academia is tough. Some people just can't compete, and then get lured into accepting offers like these. In a way, I think this is similar to how vulnerable government officials get bribed. It's not something you do unless you're rock bottom, and don't see anywhere else to go.

Another large client base for paper mills are doctors in countries where English is not a common language, and doctors are ranked based on publications rather than clinical work: they don't have time or training in research, their clinical work is in their native language, but promotions being entirely tied to publication count sets up a strong incentive to launder publications. Hospital admins aren't the most savvy about which articles in which journals are respectable, so they check boxes based on impact factor. The doctors write one paper themselves (to give seminars on) and pad their resume with a few papers nobody will ever ask questions about.

With respect to [2] - I think this is partially our garden-variety, universal impostor syndrome, but not only that: even otherwise good papers can be written so poorly as to be nearly incomprehensible, and still get published! I've come across papers that seem to be genuinely valuable and interesting work, but the amount of mental manual labor required on the reader's part is horribly daunting - mishandling or absence of grammatical articles ("a", "the", etc.), inconsistent spelling, a feeling of constant ambiguity of meaning...

I have great sympathy for the many excellent scientists who have to overcome a language barrier to get published, since the lingua franca of virtually every major journal is English. It's not inherently bad that "the language of science is bad English"; these difficulties are a symptom of pulling together good science from everywhere in the world. I'm just deeply irritated with the publishers - IEEE in particular, though the fault is by no means theirs alone - who don't care to keep up a copyediting standard for their allegedly high-quality publications, since apparently their goal is not to communicate science well, but instead to make a profit.

(I distinctly remember one of my favorite math professors stating, in no uncertain terms, that the words "a" and "the" each have different connotations with respect to existence and uniqueness. Incorrect use of either would get points knocked off of your proof.)

The existential quantifier(∃) and the unique existential quantifier (∃!) of Predicate logic correspond to "a" and "the".

Many programs have explicit (and often ridiculously high - e.g. 3+ first-author papers for a PhD) publication requirements. On top of this, many evaluation committees for grants, tenure, etc. simply count papers as opposed to actually reading them, leading to distorted incentives.

3+ papers requirement is the norm in many/most fields in Finland at least. Leads to lots of papers, which is probably not a good thing.

When I was a postdoc, my office-mate referred to them as LPUs -- "least publishable units". Squeeze as many papers as possible out of each real idea or achievement.

It contributed a lot toward my fleeing academia.

I bet the real rationale behind this, at least for most, is so they can continue to work on whatever areas they are legitimately interested in pursuing at a pace that has a hope of uncovering some new knowledge.

Data Driven = False Proxy

Can't they be curated?

4-5 conference and 1-2 journal were the requirements for me in the US. Conference had to be decently competitive IEEE or ACM and good journals. Picking something random would have gotten me into trouble with my advisor and committee.

So yeah - paper mills exist. But it’s the job of your advisor to block you from going down that road.

Now if your advisor himself is on that path I’d say you should exit your PhD. There is nothing worthwhile to be done there.

How much of that was expected to be as the lead author? That's an impressive body of work either way. I think that most top-tier CS conference papers are the product of a couple years of work from inception to presentation.

Journal paper had to be lead author. Lead author on 3 conference papers out of 6 published. That’s what I ended up with - 6 conference, 1 journal. I graduated before I got the second one published. I did ieee conference papers - so they’re the smaller size - 5-7 pages. The ACM ones are hard.

Thanks, it's interesting to hear about the range of expectations, and it definitely varies a lot by field. Putting together three 5-7 page papers seems doable (as opposed to, like, three 13-18 page IEEE Security and Privacy or USENIX Security papers). Then I imagine that extending one of those, or combining them, into a journal submission might be easier.

Although, again, it probably depends a lot on the field. Someone with a biology PhD told me that she wouldn't even list a conference paper on her CV, because only journal articles matter. In computer security, I think that even IEEE and ACM journals get the "scraps" that don't get accepted into conferences, or they get previously accepted conference papers that have been extended with 20-30% more material.

For the papers on which you weren't the lead author, were those incorporated into your dissertation or defense at all? I'm still unclear on how that's supposed to work. I'm the second author on a couple things that are related to my dissertation topic, but not part of my dissertation draft as of now (I just cite them where it's appropriate). I would at least mention them during my defense when giving an overview of my complete body of work, but maybe that's it. My own advisor actually did his dissertation on a topic that was unrelated to the three papers he got published during his time as a PhD student. Apparently, his advisor was satisfied with that output and proof that he could do research and publish, and let him spend his final year on a project for his dissertation that put him into a more marketable area.

They were. Because although I wasn’t the one who came up with the core mathematics around those I was the one who solidified proofs, did the grunt work around the code and figured out interesting edge condition behavior.

I would say I was about a 45% contributor as in the core idea was my advisors by I still did a LOT of work on them.

Yeah, I get that people need papers. I just don't see how paying to have one's name added to a sham paper with a handful of other unrelated paying customers could possibly help to meet that requirement.

If I told my committee that I got another paper accepted, and it was one of these papers, and they so much as glanced at the title and co-authors, they'd be like, "wtf?" And my academic career would be irreparably ruined.

That probably serves as an indicator that some programs aren't so much as glancing at the title and co-authors.

My university (in Central Europe) also has extremely high requirements for a PhD, even students that have 5-6 first-author papers have to fight with their supervisors to let them graduate. Part of the problem is that supervisors are automatically co-authors and are incentivised to get as many papers as possible out of their students.

I retired last year from a full-time faculty position at a university in Japan. Over my years in academia, I became increasingly thankful that I worked at an institution that didn’t pressure faculty to meet quantitative goals such as the number of papers published or the impact factor of journals. While I probably didn’t publish as much as I would have if I had been under such pressure, I am happier about what I did write and publish.

I often met academics from other institutions, though, who complained about pressure from higher administrators to raise their publication numbers, and I occasionally met administrators who seemed to see their primary job as being to raise the numbers of the faculty and researchers under them.

I am proud that my university was the first in Japan to sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, which advocates assessing research on its own merits, not on quantitative metrics [1].

[1] https://sfdora.org

At least in the EU, in public universities (most of the top universities are public), publishing papers and getting citations are critical metrics for getting grants and any kind of position.

Post-docs often need to get a grant to fund their position in a group, open positions are rare. Usually, it's not the university paying you, you bring in the money from a public funding application, and the university and your supervisor take a cut. These positions tend to last at most 3 years, then you need to do it all over again to get a new position, often in a totally different country, and repeat that for 10-15 years until you are able to get tenure somewhere, or some other kind of semi-permantent position like assistant professor.

Then once you have tenure, if you want to advance your career and start a research group, you need to keep getting bigger grants for PhD and Post-doc positions within the group.

For all of this getting publication "points" is absolutely critical. The situation in academia right now is horribly competitive and metrics focused, for "fairness". Frankly, society pushed too many people onto studying pure sciences, and we really don't need that many full-time researchers and professors, relatively speaking, with the upmost respect of publicly funded R&D. So it's not hard to (extort) make researchers pay to get their work published, instead of the other way around.

Of course, the reputation of the journal or conference counts, but these paper-mills can reduce the risk of not getting published and give you a chance to at least get some citations.

I can see how the following "services" would be helpful to a desperate academic:

1. Paying to have one's legitimate manuscript accepted, instead of going through the normally time-consuming and capricious process of reviews and revisions and re-submissions.

2. Paying to build up the citation count for existing publications.

But the what the article is describing seems to be well beyond that and crazy.

OT question but is anyone ever denied their PhD during their defense? I know of plenty of people that drop out or don't finish but have never heard anyone that didn't pass the defense so just curious if that happens?

Of the ~ten people I know who've defended in my department in the last three years, two of them had issues. The first one might have passed the defense (I'm not sure), but didn't graduate until negotiating and making some changes to the dissertation, about a year later. The second one did not pass the defense, needs to make some changes to the dissertation, and will defend again soon. In both cases, there were some weird personal grievances between the student and a committee member, or between committee members.

In every other case, the defense seemed like a formality; like the committee had mostly made their decision before giving the go-ahead to schedule the defense. One of those defenses was really rough - I thought the guy had failed - but he passed and graduated a few weeks later as planned.

To be clear, I don't (yet) know of anyone who reached the point of having a defense, failed it, and ultimately dropped out or got eliminated from the program.

Thanks for the reply and sharing that. That fits my understanding and makes sense. Given the amount of time invested, you should really establish beforehand whether it's a worthy thesis or not. I guess the defense is more about establishing whether the work is really your own and you didn't have other people do the work that you don't understand.

> ...establish beforehand whether it's a worthy thesis...

I think you're describing the process of putting together a dissertation proposal, and I think it might be the hardest part of getting a PhD. To do that, one first needs to acquire a broad knowledge of the field (which is what the qualifying exams are testing after one finishes all the required coursework) so that one can read papers and understand them. Then one needs to do a deep literature review of a narrow area to see where there are gaps or opportunities. And then one needs to come up with ideas to address those gaps and opportunities. The proposal is the presentation of all this, and the committee decides whether it is worthy (novel, impactful, etc.) or not. That can take a few years. Once the proposal is approved, one "just" needs to execute on the ideas; that's still a lot of work (like years of work), and could easily go off-the-rails or show that early assumptions were invalid or whatever, but I think it's more straightforward than trying to brainstorm worthy research ideas (that are appropriately scoped for a PhD) in the first place.

One way to get in trouble at the defense seems to be deviating too much from the proposal without keeping the committee members informed. Or people have turnover on their committee, so the people who approved the proposal aren't the same people at the defense. In theory, these problems should still surface before a public defense is scheduled; like if committee members are surprised or have questions, that should come up in private and be resolved before there's any public embarrassment on either side. In the two ugly cases I saw, people basically weren't communicating with each other due to personal grievances, so this didn't happen.

> I guess the defense is more about establishing whether the work is really your own and you didn't have other people do the work that you don't understand.

I don't think so. Those things are too fundamental and shouldn't even be in question. I'd say that the defense is mostly about tradition. After that, I think it's mostly about one's ability to clearly communicate the work. In theory, a PhD should be able to teach, so it kind of tests one's ability to go out into the world and do that while representing the committee / department / school in a positive manner.

Thanks, that's interesting.

Not that you should but reading your comment had me think of doing a meta study on the most crappy papers in your field.

Perhaps include as many as possible and attempt to [politely] categorize them.

There should be plenty of opportunty for interesting conversation/networking and lots of help available.

> On one hand, I look at what gets accepted into the top-tier conferences and journals and I feel like I can't possibly compete;

I do hope you follow retraction watch. Even that tier of publication is not immune to fraud, no matter how well put together it appears.

It's pretty much in the article as many countries (not just those listed) massively incentivise quantity over quality of publications, and anyway quality is hard to judge and the proxies used are relatively easy to game. A paper mill combined with plagiarism, a citation ring and a bit of deliberately overly complicated exposition (or just plain lack of writing skill) supports many a career in academia I'm afraid.

Grifters who get to have their names on a lot of papers in order to fool an Oprah audience.

> Who is this for?

People at dubious institutions in Europe and Asia. They get high status by having lots of papers. They then get awards and grant money. And get to be on senior level committees, etc.

For a lot of them, academia is a stepping stone to something bigger.

> People at dubious institutions in Europe and Asia. They get high status by having lots of papers. They then get awards and grant money. And get to be on senior level committees, etc.

There are currently labs from T-20 institutions in the US that do the exact same as well.