Behind China’s ‘mind power’ egg scandal, where academic ghostwriters quote US$400 to get bogus science published
- Writers advertising on e-commerce platforms say they can arrange for articles to be published in journals indexed on China’s largest research database
- No significant reduction of academic fraud in past 20 years, according to scholar who works to expose it
China’s for-profit academic publishing industry has drawn criticism again after a paper claimed chickens could be hatched from boiled eggs, but commentators say shady practices continue to thrive.
Their assertions are backed up by inquiries by the South China Morning Post that revealed how easy it is to find ghostwriters offering to produce a “scientific” paper and get it placed in an academic journal.
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How China produces a billion eggs a day
According to Fang Shimin, a US-based scholar and commentator who has been exposing pseudoscience and fraud for 20 years, China has the world’s largest market for academic publishing, partly because many professions require publishing research papers as a job performance indicator.
He said that some of those lacking the ability to do research resorted to hiring essay ghostwriters and paying journals to publish fake essays.
“I was amused when I came across the boiled eggs essay, but not surprised,” Fang said. “I’ve seen many laughable essays previously.
“In the 20 years since I started working to expose academic fraud in China, there’s been no fundamental change.”