Fifty ways to detect a ghostwriter

Abstract

Ghostwriting became students’ most popular way to avoid writing of boring essays, or the best way to easily earn by writing on behalf of another student. This paper presents several markers indicating a presence of potential ghostwriters. Proposed methodology suggests various inspection techniques, which do not prove anything in isolation. Whenever they are jointly implemented, they successfully cluster the essays, suggesting plausible absence, potential and almost certain presence of one or few ghostwriters. After the initial clustering, all the papers go through subtle linguistic check. In our sample, later approach discovered some unexpected phrases which confirmed the presence of the same ghostwriters not only in the current, but also in the previous generations.