Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- Experts from the Institute of Macroeconomic and Regional Research (IMRI) studied how ghostwriting and plagiarism hinder the development of science.

Research and innovation are key to driving long-term productivity growth and therefore economic development. Fundamental research plays a special role in this.

In order to develop science in Uzbekistan, the government’s “Strategy 2030” includes the following tasks:

Increasing the productivity of scientific research and increasing the scientific potential in universities to 70%.

Increasing the number of researchers for every million people to 2 thousand.

This will strengthen the country’s scientific potential, lay the foundations for long-term economic growth and national security of the country.

Achieving positive results and effects is possible only with the formation of a conscientious academic/scientific environment in the country. This is especially important in today’s environment of fast results, increasing competition, easy access to information on the Internet and financial incentives.

In pursuit of an easy solution, people in the academic environment are increasingly beginning to resort to the use of ghostwriting and plagiarism.

Ghostwriting is the writing of works for another person (including for money), who will subsequently impersonate the author. Plagiarism is the unauthorized use and copying of someone else’s material without acknowledging the original source.

There are 3 forms of academic dishonesty or the use of ghostwriting:

1. Ordering/using someone else’s scientific work as your own.

2. Writing/preparing a research paper for another person.

3. Use of AI is intentional fraud and academic misconduct.

People first started talking about ghostwriters back in the 1960s.

And since then, the scope and sophistication of ghostwriting fraud has only grown.

For example, recently the Chronicle of Higher Education magazine described the experience of “Ed Dante,” who over the past year wrote 5,000 pages of scientific research on order, and also prepared 12 theses (for doctoral and master’s students) of at least 50 pages.

Increasingly, the Internet and AI are being used for ghostwriting. The most famous case is the international scandal surrounding the use of the MyMaster platform by students. These students were expelled or suspended. This platform is no longer operational, but many other sites offer similar illegal services.

The fight against academic dishonesty is also intensifying and making progress. Ross et al. note that a case was filed regarding the ghostwriting of scientific papers by researchers in 2008. Also, tools for identifying and combating ghostwriting and plagiarism are constantly being improved, especially in the field of recognizing texts written by AI.

While any form of plagiarism is destructive to the academic system, ghostwriting is especially harmful: in addition to violating intellectual property laws and literary theft, ghostwriting takes on someone else’s identity, which amounts to fraud.

And this trend is especially alarming, because... More and more people around the world are admitting to cheating. It is estimated that today one in six students use this service.

As the experience of discussions with University students shows, the main attention in the fight against dishonesty should be paid to preventive measures, such as education and changing the mentality of teachers and students.

An important component is also the optimization of legislation in the field of copyright and intellectual property protection, with stricter responsibility both for using someone else’s work as one’s own, and for writing a scientific work for another person.