Ghosts in the machine

Breaching research integrity is often regarded as, at worst, a white-collar crime reserved for nerdy types who couldn’t quite cut it intellectually; at best, it’s not even regarded at all – it is simply invisible to most people as they go about their lives. However, this may be about to change with the release of a new documentary that may bring the problem home to many people.  

The Shadow Scholars was launched at a number of film festivals in 2025 and will continue in 2026, and can now be viewed across various streaming platforms (with more to come), including Channel 4 in the UK and YouTube. It follows Oxford professor Patricia Kingori as she looks at the development of paper mills in her home country of Kenya and the huge impact they have had on the country’s economy and those highly educated people who write articles for money.  

Global problem 

An expert in the experiences of frontline workers around the world, Kingori herself admitted in an interview with Times Higher Education that sometimes academic research can seem dry and unrelatable, but that this story brought the two sides together. It is estimated that tens of millions of students have benefited from essays written by ghost writers or ‘shadow scholars,’ many of whom live in Kenya as highly educated but underemployed workers.  

The real crime, as Kingori sees it, is not just the cheating that is going on, but that those who cheat will go on to be doctors, lawyers, or even academics themselves in the future, profiting from well-paid Global North jobs on the back of the work done by Kenyan and other Global South ghost writers. Furthermore, far from being ashamed of their work, many Kenyan writers in the documentary are proud of the work they have done on behalf of others, even though their identity as authors has not been recognized. 

Local solutions 

The film is a heartbreaking watch, particularly as there is an even darker threat behind the story, namely the emergence of Generative AI, which threatens the livelihoods of so many ghostwriters almost overnight. While this may remove the injustice of using essay mill workers to further the ends of those who are willing to pay to cheat, it will not remove the cheating itself, which is simply moving to the cheaper, quicker, and more accessible Gen AI platforms.  

One can’t help feeling that the Global North has to shoulder much of the blame here, and not just because its people were using the services in the first place. Global South research has been shamefully ignored over the years as the Western research paradigm has gained primacy, with journals effectively ignoring research from the Global South for ‘quality’ reasons, when the reality is that Global North research has cited other Global North research almost exclusively. Research should be allowed to flourish on its own terms, no matter where it comes from, and if that had been the case all along, many of the Kenyan authors in Kingori’s film might be successful academics now instead of working in the shadows.