Why You Should Avoid Paper Mills In Research

The desperation to get done with research in a time-bound manner and obtain doable scores is one of the primary causes of the poor research works being produced every year. Students, and even experienced professors, have begun to actively participate in the production of inconsequential, plagiarised research for the sake of increasing their academic credentials.
In India, for example, there is a requirement for those enrolled in PhD programs to publish at least two research papers in well-recognized publications. Many students resort to illegitimate practices just because they want to fulfil these requirements. They lack the seriousness to contribute to the scholarship and their reckless actions often cost them their PhDs.
There are many ways all of this is executed. One such way is getting help from a paper mill. In today’s discussion, I shall be focussing on why one should avoid using paper mills for their research. The layout of the article has been built in such a way that those who aren’t aware of the paper mills will get a basic idea along with reasons why these mills are harmful to academia.

1. First of all, what is a paper mill?
   To put it in simple words, it is very much like asking a friend or a sibling to write your homework in consideration of some benefit. Similarly, a paper mill is an organization (an illegal one!) that writes papers for its clients in return for monetary benefit. These paper mills hire a team of ghostwriters who take up projects, write for the client, keep a certain sum to themselves, and let the mill keep the rest. Essentially, these organizations thrive on fraudulent activities so do the clients who do not write their own papers but get them done by others.

2. Who are the clients?
   I think it is easy to guess who these clients are. Students, professors, and researchers from all kinds of disciplines and all parts of the world are interacting with paper mills. From high school students to professors with decades of experience, these individuals place requests for ready-to-submit papers, upload the requirements on the platform, and await the completion of the paper. The amount paid by these clients is nothing to sneeze at; the ghostwriters writing these papers for the clients earn a significant sum from work, even more than an average, full-time content writer.

3. Who are the ghostwriters in a paper mill?
   You may be wondering who those ghostwriters are. Before I tell you that, let me briefly explain what ghostwriting is all about. The word is self-explanatory; ghostwriting essentially involves writing as a ghost. You will be writing the whole thing but won’t get the credit for the same. In technical terms, you will have no copyright on your content. What’s more, you will not even be provided with any mention ever in the article. No one will know that you wrote a particular article because no one will tell.
   It is understandable why paper mills need people who are not touchy about intellectual property rights. Today, paper mills conduct examinations of the applicants, make them undergo several assessments, and interview them wherever possible. They want to avoid any conflicts between clients and writers over authorship.
   Now, back to the main question: who are these people? If you thought they were necessarily advanced researchers, you are wrong. Many of these ghostwriters are either new or seasoned freelancers who do not have expertise in any particular area but write in any and every discipline in existence. It is not that you want to get a research paper in law written; you will necessarily get a law graduate to write it for you.

4. What is the problem?
   By this time, you must have understood the problems concerning paper mills. But, for better understanding, let me enumerate them. Papers produced in these mills are generally developed on a pre-defined template that causes similarity in formatting and organization of the content. Identical phrases are very commonly found in papers written by paper mills. Papers are usually plagiarised or blatantly paraphrased from published papers and seldom incorporate anything innovative in them.
   The data sources used by ghostwriters are often poor quality or easily alterable on media such as Wikipedia, which undermines the research’s reliability. Also, and as already obvious by now, your papers will be written by no experts in the field; these writers have a knack for writing, but that does not mean they can write about everything under the sun.

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