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ARTICLE | Politics & Policy

Science says academic black market 'flourishing' in China

December 3, 2013 1:45 AM UTC

Science conducted a five-month investigation in China and said a black market for journal authorship is "flourishing" in the country. In an article on the topic, Science said black market options include self-plagiarizing by translating a paper already published in Chinese and resubmitting it in English or hiring a ghostwriter to write a paper from faked or independently gathered data. Science said scientists in China also are paying as much as $26,300 for an authorship slot on a paper written by other scientists that will appear in a journal included in Thomson Reuters' Science Citation Index (SCI) or Elsevier's Engineering Index.

The publishers use the indices to evaluate the "impact factor" of a journal, or how often the average paper in the journal is cited. Science noted that many promotion schemes in China are based on total number of publications in an SCI journal without accounting for the impact factor, so there is a black market for agencies that sell papers to be published in less stringent journals with "negligible" impact factors. ...