Paper mills expose global market for authorship fraud, Nature analysis finds

An analysis published in Nature has revealed the scale of the global market for fake research authorship, with thousands of adverts offering positions on academic papers for sale.

Researchers compiled a dataset of more than 18,700 adverts posted between March 2020 and early April 2026 by seven paper mills – businesses that produce fraudulent or low-quality research and sell authorship slots. The companies are understood to target academics in regions including the Middle East, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and India.

The study found that a first-author position costs a median of nearly $800, with prices ranging from $57 to more than $5,600. The findings are described in a preprint submitted to arXiv.

Researchers say the dataset could help journals and publishers identify high-risk submissions. Co-author Reese Richardson, a metascientist at Northwestern University, told Nature the data could be used to screen publications and audit which journals and research areas are most frequently targeted.

“The preprint paints a valuable picture of the significant financial scale of these operations, underscoring the pressure put on researchers to publish in order to advance in their careers,” a spokesperson for Wiley told Nature.

The dataset highlights the international scope of paper mills. Researchers identified adverts on Telegram linked to operations in India, Iraq and Uzbekistan, alongside thousands more from websites associated with businesses in Russia, Latvia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

“What we’re beginning to see here is a pattern of global operations and the platformisation of social media and online websites to operate a global network of businesses and corporations that exist for the purposes of scientific and academic fraud,” says Sarah Eaton of the University of Calgary. The data set “tells us an awful lot about the businesses, their marketing and some of their operations”.

All seven paper mills advertised authorship slots, while some also offered placements on textbooks, patents and other outputs, as well as services such as academic awards.

“Paper mills are really in a variety of different businesses to the extent that the phrase ‘paper mill’ doesn’t capture everything that’s going on,” says Richardson. “I like to think of them as businesses operating in the market for reputation manipulation.”

The analysis suggests some paper-mill manuscripts reach publication. Nature’s journalists reviewed more than 600 adverts linked to around 400 articles, identifying 53 published papers with matching titles. Only five have been retracted.

Among the remaining papers, examples were found in journals published by Springer Nature and Wiley, as well as conference proceedings from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Additional matches appeared in journals from Elsevier, Frontiers and Taylor & Francis.