I am an academic fraud : PhD

I want to start by apologizing to all you academics who hold up the pillars of science with integrity. You are better than me.

It all started early in my PhD as a new graduate student. I joined a group which consisted of individuals all from the same country, with the exception of me. At first I thought they were extremely productive and were knowledgeable on just about everything due to their research output. These students/postdocs were averaging about 3 first-author papers per year, amazing. After my first year, I finally had enough data to write my own paper which we submitted to a journal. After submitting, my supervisor asked me to draft comments for my paper. I though of this an an exercise to imagine I am reviewing my own paper to find any potential holes that reviewers may ask. Except it turns out that I was LITERALLY reviewing my own paper. When I got the comments back I found that I was actually reviewer #1. It turns out, this was extremely common and almost every one in my group did this for all their papers. My supervisor has a network of "friends" who he requests as reviewers, who then let him give comments for his own papers. Obviously they're always accepted. The extreme research output in my group and high acceptance rate was due to almost every submission having at least 1 or 2 of his "friends" as peer reviewers, and this was not at low level journals. This is how I inadvertently first got caught up in academic dishonesty.

Then came the added co-authorship to all papers. My name, being Western, could add significant value to these foreigners papers. As such, my supervisor put my name on almost all papers and used me of a grammar checker of sorts. This definitely does not warrant authorship. In a few cases, he even demanded to put me as co-first author on papers for other group members that I had edited many papers for. I didn't really have a say in this and it was my duty, according to my supervisor. I don't even want to say how many papers I have my name on or what my h-index is, it makes me cringe thinking someone could see it as reasonable. I had more papers than most career professors by my 3rd year.

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