Want Q1 journal authorship? Just hit up Facebook

Illustration: TBS

The opening gambit was warm. 

"Bhaiya, we can help you out with the complete research paper writing till publication."

A direct question seemed the fastest way through the noise: "Will it be possible to put in no effort at all and still get published? And when would payment be due?"

There was no hesitation in the reply.

"Yes, it is possible. We can do the full work for you."

This was a snippet of the conversation between us, posing as someone interested in the services of a Facebook page named Bookman Research and Training Institute – BRTI.

A second page, Academic Writers, offered essentially the same service: writing and publishing a paper on the client's behalf. 

When asked for some reviews and references, they politely declined, yet their words disclosed more than their silence.

"Our services are kept strictly bound by client-service provider confidentiality. We do not use live links to our clients' published works, as this can lead to their paper being retracted, or even scholarships being cancelled," the page's social media moderator responded.

The statement is an admission in itself that what is being sold carries a risk serious enough to end the very things its buyers are chasing. The page then offered a free 15-minute session, during which, it said, a consultant would explain how the operation worked and who was involved.

So, if you want to get published in a Q1 journal but cannot find the time to write it yourself, these pages can take over the responsibility for you.

Their offering is simple and direct, as all marketing messages should be.

If you happen to be a university student, a post like this from a random Facebook page might have surfaced in your feed. Interact with the post and scroll further; you might stumble across another page with a similar post. This time, the pitch is more detailed.

A list is laid out like a restaurant menu:

Q1 Journal – First Author – 70k

Q1 Journal – Second Author – 60k

Q1 Journal – Sixth Author – 20k

Non-Scopus Journal – First Author – 15k

And the list continues. Prices vary depending on the level of authorship and the quality of the journal. But the idea remains the same: you can now buy authorship at Q1 journals for as little as Tk20,000, and in some cases, even cheaper. 

And it is not hidden away in some encrypted chat, whispered about only among those who already know — it has become a full-blown business, one this investigation found university teachers, professional researchers, and foreign students all contributing to, in some capacity.

The ad is marketed to everyone who might be potentially interested, including a journalist who happens to have no publication record.

The Business Standard decided to find out what happens next.

A conversation with the 'consultant'

The session with Academic Writers took place over WhatsApp, a voice call scheduled a day in advance. On the other end was a man who introduced himself as the supervisor — no, he was careful to clarify, a subject expert himself. 

"I'm originally the supervisor here. I supervise all the projects. We have a team," he said.

"Any discipline would do," the supervisor clarified. "We have an expert for every field here."

The process was explained with the ease of something recited many times before: a full research paper consisting of 5,000-6,000 words will be completed within a few weeks. Two or three topics offered to choose from, selected, he said, for how easily the information could be gathered and how likely the paper was to clear a journal's desk.

Then came a detail that undercuts whatever legitimacy the earlier pitch had tried to claim.

"We submit to seven or eight journals simultaneously," the supervisor said.

Most reputable journals require authors to declare, formally, that a submitted paper is not under consideration anywhere else. But the supervisor states it in a matter-of-fact manner.

The payment structure followed a familiar pattern here, as with BRTI. Half of the money has to be paid up front, half on delivery. Tk8,000 to begin the paper. A second fifty-fifty split for the publication phase itself — the final half due only once an acceptance email arrives from the journal.

He had been doing this, he said, since 2011. When asked whether this research will be carried out by qualified people, he claimed that the researchers were Bangladeshi students affiliated with universities in Australia and Canada, sometimes even university faculty members. Not an unexpected revelation, considering very few possess the skills to conduct research worthy enough to get published in a Scopus journal.

On an ordinary day, he put the number of prospective clients he met at 10-12.

The claim could not be independently verified. But if accurate, it suggests a business operating at a scale beyond occasional freelance work.

Why students buy in

First it was the visa. Then it was the funds. Now, to move abroad, students need something more: admission into a credible university, and enough funding to actually get there. That funding becomes easier to secure once a student has a publication behind their name. This is where the "academic thesis writing assistants" step in.

There is already a name for what they do — paper mill. A paper mill is an operation that manufactures research output — papers, authorship, sometimes, like this case, entire theses for sale, with little or no involvement from the person whose name ends up on the final product. 

The term has been used to describe similar operations from Russia to India to China. Bangladesh, this investigation found, has its own.

An earlier investigation by Prothom Alo traced at least 325 retracted papers connected to researchers across Bangladeshi universities and institutions between 2019 and June this year. 

Daffodil International University accounted for 44 of them; North South University, 42; Jahangirnagar University, 32; United International University, 21; and Dhaka University, 20.

The numbers spread wide enough to suggest this isn't a problem confined to a single department, university, or one ambitious professor chasing a ranking. It looks like an infrastructure.

But how does an operation like this run openly on Facebook, in plain sight, for years, without anyone stepping in?

According to Abdus Salam, Professor at the Institute of Education and Research, Dhaka University, "The weakness is not in the sellers, but in the audience. Social media literacy in Bangladesh, and across South Asia more broadly, remains low. Information reaches people through Facebook, YouTube, television — with no editorial board standing between the claim and the reader, the way a newspaper once had."

When asked who could actually write something good enough for a Q1 journal, he admitted that real research has to exist somewhere in the process, done by someone who actually knows how to do it.

On the practice itself, he didn't hold back. "This is unethical, and it is not accepted anywhere in the world."