paper mill

In academia these days the worth of an academic is measured by the number of papers he or she can publish.  There are businesses, paper mills, which cater to this demand by publishing poor quality papers or even fraudulent papers that can be passed off as genuine research.  Some of them will offer to write the paper for you — for a price.  It has been possible for some years now for students to buy essays from an essay mill so now the academics have caught up.

A related term is zombie publication.  This is not an article on the latest research into zombies (although some universities do teach zombie studies) but research that is based on outdated or fraudulent science (another kind of zombie studies).  Such papers, one would hope, are identified in which case a retraction is demanded.  Unfortunately not everyone realises that the paper has been retracted and the zombie publication goes on infecting genuine scientific attempts.