Buying a paper from an essay writing service is clearly immoral. Having someone edit or rewrite one's paper in proper English if that is not one's native language is acceptable, although if the rewriting is extensive or especially if the service provider is working from the researcher's detailed comprehensive notes or outline rather than a finished first draft, the service provider should IMHO be acknowledged and thanked in the paper. Such writing services are sometimes included in the budget of a research grant.

Why “finished first draft”? This needs to be studied as a concept.

Dennis Mazur That's rather cryptic. Can you explain more? Perhaps "first" may not be quite right. However, there is a difference in terms of time and energy needed to work with a completed draft in broken English than to work from notes and/or outlines. A completed draft in broken English should take less time, since it would essentially be a revision from substandard to standard English. Another possibility I didn't mention and should have is when the researcher writes mainly in his own language but needs to submit to an English language journal. Writer and translator must usually work together with back and forth querying, especially if the paper is in a humanities or social science discipline where the vocabularies tend to be broader, less standardized, and more open to ambiguity and allusion than, say, a paper in chemistry.

I am certain that there is a rather wide and deep range of what is considered a “first draft” of a manuscript by an author. The study I was proposing has two part:

Part 1. Define the various levels of the “quality” of a “first draft of a scientific manuscript suitable for submission to a first-rate (top tier) peer-reviewed scientific journal”.

The results of Part 1 gives you a set of manuscripts (ranked eg 1-5) where

1. Is lowest quality of the first draft and

5. Is highest quality of the first draft.

Part 2. attempts to ascertain which of the following variables are associated with selecting 1. - 5 as characteristics of the scientist placing the various manuscripts at level 1

level 2

level 3

level 4

level 5

Such characteristics might include:

a. Scientist’s age

b. Scientist‘s language

c. Scientist’s work experience: academic vs. private

d. Number of scientific articles published in scientific journals

e. Number of scientific articles published in top-tier scientific journals etc.

In a case when;

A professor has an objective, data and theme but he has no time for write up as it needs time with cool and calm environment. He hires a suitable person who writes and professor read it and demands the required changes and pays the writer in terms of monetary benefits instead of authorship?

Ethics?

These are commercial aspects (ethics has nothing to do with it).

Dennis Mazur Oh, I see. You're concerned with determining the quality of a first draft. I've already expressed a misgiving about my earlier use of the qualifier "first". So let's just refer instead to the draft (or notes and outlines) that more or less expresses the full ideational content of what the author intends to publish, except not as presently worded. Presumably a writer or editor hired to render a draft into a form suitable for submission will be responsible only for quality of style and communicability, and not with the quality of the ideas expressed or of the research involved.

You nonetheless present an interesting but very abstract conceptual research proposal. But I'm wondering how the terms of analysis and results of such a study could be utilized — perhaps in relation to some general issues in social epistemology or maybe in some AI expert system to assist in allocating research funding?

Gioacchino de Candia RE: "ethics has nothing to do with it"

In my first comment I said that "Buying a paper from an essay writing service is clearly immoral." You disagree?

No sir Karl Pfeifer, i am not disagree with you.

Karl, in the world in which I trained considered the definition of the term “draft” of a scientific manuscript as a piece of concept-based and much further along in turn of its development than “notes and outlines”. Perhaps the bright commercial editor should be given not only money for his or her work, but at minimum co-authorship or first-authorship of the paper if it leads to a good editor accepting the scientific article for publication in a reasonable scientific journal.

Dennis Mazur Dennis, well yes, but I wasn't equating notes and outlines with a draft manuscript, just indicating different starting points for a hired writer. "Notes and outlines" can, however, cover a lot of terrain, and sometimes can also be pretty darn close to a paper, e.g. if it's got everything that the finished paper is supposed to contain, only mostly written in "point form" instead of regular prose. I am of two minds about granting coauthorship. I'd be reluctant to suggest coauthorship for someone who had no part in or even understanding of the research or scholarship involved (like a gal I knew who had her BA in Greek & Roman Classics but earned money copyediting papers in chemistry). On the other hand, on Big Science projects with huge research teams, coauthorship is often more like movie credits where everyone who was somehow involved gets a mention.

Karl Pfeifer your comment, honestly, I had not read it.

The point remains: it is not about ethics or morality / immorality, but about simple commercial aspects.

The speech would also involve aspects relating to copyright, 360 ° publishing, etc. etc..

Frankly, there is no need to talk about it, also because the argument could never be exhausted.

Gioacchino de Candia Let me get this straight. If a student buys a paper from an essay writing service for submission as a term paper* for a course, that's merely a commercial transaction? Clearly there are two wrongs committed. The first is that the student could be in violation of a university's academic honesty code (in my position I was involved in several such cases referred to the university's academic honesty committee). The second is that the essay writing service, despite the usual disclaimers, typically markets its service to students for the very purpose of producing a finished course paper that can be handed in, relying on legal loopholes, inadequate legislation, and carefully worded promotional language. Admittedly liability in the second case might be more difficult to establish, but "not illegal" is not the same as "not unethical".

Even putting such plagiarism cases aside, the discussion in this thread has been not just with the commercial transaction -- which could in principle be just commercial if the buyer of the service merely kept the finished paper in a drawer. Ethics enters the picture when the paper is distributed or submitted and questions of appropriate attribution and credit must be considered.

_____________

* Actually the situation nowadays is much worse. One can buy entire theses in the writing of which one played no part. So there are people out there who have graduate degrees based on research they have purchased. (Of course this occurs mostly in the humanities, where the research is entirely based on texts.)

@Karl Pfeifer Are these commercial writing phenomena more of an Eastern or Western phenomenon? There is a commercial concept in the West of “ghost writing” found in scientific journals focusing on newly developed prescription medications. Is there an Eastern version as well?

Dennis Mazur I can't answer your question directly. However, given that so many predatory journals originate in the East, it makes sense that there would be offshoots that enabled people to get published without doing much (or any) work of their own.

BTW, here is an example of an essay writing service. There’s even a pop-up window that says, “Your A+ is just a click away”:

• https://extraessay.com/?key_wpg=37b85cbb7e8c20540ee2128bf9e2c5be

And here is an example of a carefully worded ad for a dissertation writing service:

• https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/dissertations-for-sale/

In accordance with the considerations of Karl Pfeifer@

Karl Pfeifer it is clear that the situation is negative, who denies it?

However, if things have taken this turn the responsibility is also of the teachers, who have not supervised adequately and, therefore, have not played an important part of their work.

Look in the mirror.