LinkedIn suggested a job as a perfect match for my skills: Being a ghost writer. Curious, I clicked on the job description, thinking: “This can’t possibly be what it sounds like, right?” It was. According to the website, the ghost writing agency has their seat in Berlin, and they have anonymised reviews by happy university students who’d received a high grade on their assignment or thesis thanks to work written by the ghost writers and submitted in the students’ names, and non-anonymised profiles of ghost writers, along with their photos and the average rating by their customers. Three thoughts came to my mind, I don’t remember in which order: “How is this legal?”, “Well, I do have the skills for that job!”, and “Can we expect students not to rely on the services of ghost writers if many academics do the same?”
This blog post is about the third thought. In the form of paper mills, ghost writing may be more common that you’d think, but it’s a topic I don’t know much about and other people have written about it before (e.g., Anna Albakina & Dorothy Bishop, https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2yf8z_v1, https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/6mbgv_v1). Relying on the services of paper mills is clearly beyond any grey areas, but there are other forms of what I’d personally call ghost writing and that seem to be perfectly acceptable in some circles in academia.
The specific case I’m thinking of is grant writing. It’s not uncommon that a grant is submitted in a professor’s name, but written by PhD students or postdocs. There are few cases that are black or white, as early career researchers contribute to varying numbers of sections to varying extents, ranging from brainstorming specific ideas to actually writing the whole proposal. As far as I know, there is no consensus about what is actually acceptable. Of course, there are many advantages of involving early career researchers in the grant writing process. They learn a lot: both about the scientific processes that are part of the steps between idea generation and having a plan, and about the arguably less pleasant sides of the academic profession associated with the pressure of grant writing. Furthermore, the idea is often that, if the grant is successful, the student or postdoc will be hired to work on it, so it’s nice to give them the opportunity to contribute their own ideas.
In my own grant proposals, I have received very valuable input from my PhD students. Though I’m sure that would have been able and genuinely happy to contribute much more than I allowed / asked them to, I always had the idea in the back of my mind that I didn’t want to submit their work as my own. Depending on the grant, it’s sometimes possible to add PhD students as contributors, but at other times there are formal limitations, such as all (co-)applicants needing to have a PhD, or that there can be only one applicant (e.g., as is the case for some ERC grants). My own policy is to limit colleagues’ contributions to providing comments and discussions when I can’t add them as co-applicants, so I don’t end up submitting sentences or even whole sections as my own intellectual work when I haven’t actually written them. However, I’m sure that’s not the only defensible thing to do. Thus, I don’t propose that what I do is what everyone should do – rather, maybe we should start rethinking the whole process of determining intellectual contributions, acknowledging people’s work, and awarding research funding?
Regardless of where we draw the line: Is grant ghost writing really that bad? Maybe it’s just common knowledge that a grant submitted by a professor was likely not actually written by the professor. I honestly don’t know how common this is – only that it’s common enough that, at a webinar about how to write academic CVs, there was a whole discussion about how to take credit for successful grant proposals that you wrote but are not listed on. This brings us to problem number one: Early career researchers don’t get formal credit for their work, even though they need it most. The second problem that I see is in the quality of the project: One would think (hope?) that the professor is more experienced and thus better able to write a high-quality proposal. By getting early career researchers involved too much, the chances of success are thus being diminished. In my view, this puts the professor in a bad light: By offloading their work, they are decreasing the chance that they will be able to support the early career researchers on their team by getting the grant to extend their contracts.
In a way, I think that this problem with grant ghost writing is yet another manifestation of the academic system not changing as fast as the world is. There are two changes that the grant writing system doesn’t seem to consider: First, the change from the lone genius idea to team science. Although it’s nice to have grants that specifically promote a promising researcher, it’s utopian, in most fields, to assume that a large project can be conceived, let alone executed, without intellectual contributions from others. Second, the change from getting a job via the good old boys' club to fierce competition. One of the arguments for involving early career researchers in the grant writing process is that they would have a job if the proposal is successful. Maybe in the past, appeasing your professor by helping them write the grant proposal would raise your chances of getting a job. Maybe the chances of getting the grant were higher back then. And if the grant proposal was not successful, the professor was probably in a better position to get you a job, anyway – either through his own funding, or by calling his old buddy and asking if they didn’t have a suitable position in their lab. Maybe this still happens more often than we think. Still, from anecdotal observations, it is much more important for an early career researcher to get on their own two feet, both subjectively and objectively. Subjectively, one doesn’t want to be known as “Professor such-and-such’s PhD student”, even years after graduation. Objectively, one doesn’t want to – and simply cannot – rely on a single person’s good will to get a job. Although connections, of course, help in getting a job, the competition is with colleagues who have worked on their own projects, associated with gaining funding as a principal investigator and publishing first-author papers on topics that are not spin-offs of the professor’s interests.
Is grant ghost writing morally better than students submitting ghost-written assignments and theses? “Real” academia, as opposed to the bachelor thesis of a student without academic ambitions, is a joint venture, where it may simply be understood that a single piece of writing is not the intellectual property of whoever wrote it, but of everyone who contributed, directly and indirectly. Still, it’s not easy to pinpoint exactly what makes grant ghost writing better than ghost writing by students in university assignments. In both cases, the person in whose name the work is submitted gets an advantage – either a good grade or a degree that they don’t deserve, or funding and a stronger CV. It’s difficult to say if more is at stake in the former or the latter case. And what about the ghost writers? Well, I could do some further research to see if postdocs and PhD students get a better salary, on average, than the ghost writers at the Berlin-based company. But somehow that feels like it would be beside the point…
