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Profits from online thesis trading soar
By Zhao Chunzhe (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-12-17 15:12
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The trading volume of online thesis websites is worth 180 million yuan ($26.3 million) to 540 million yuan ($79 million) per year, according to research by a scholar cited in the Yangtze Daily Thursday.
Shen Yang, an associate professor at the Information Management of Wuhan University in Hubei province, regarded the thesis trading as a new subject in the information research field and researched it for a long time..
According to Shen's research, most buyers are from institutes of higher learning and research institutions that navigate to the thesis trading websites through search engines and then publish the purchased thesis in illegal journals.
By typing words such as "ghostwriters," "thesis," and "buying paper" into search engines like "Baidu" or "Google" 323 thesis websites pop up immediately.
According to the statistics of the top 20 thesis trading pages at Taobao, a leading online trading platform in China, on average it takes 649 yuan ($95) to buy a paper.
The online papers cover a variety of subjects and the websites provide all kinds of services, like thesis writing, thesis translation and thesis publishing and searching. People can join the business by setting up an office somewhere to contact the people buying and selling, like a network in thesis trading.
"We should stop regarding thesis as the only assessment to get a promotion, and cancel the dissertations of gradates who don't specialize in researching. The online journals also need strict disciplines to raise the credibility," Shen said.
