This is the most important policy on Researchor. It defines what the platform is for, and it is part of the Terms of Service.
The principle
Researchor facilitates research support. It does not facilitate academic misconduct.
The difference is not the subject matter or the difficulty of the work. It is whether the output is submitted by someone as their own work when it is not, or whether it misrepresents the research record.
A statistician who runs an analysis and explains the method is providing research support. The same statistician writing a dissertation chapter for a student to submit under their own name is participating in misconduct. The skills are identical. The use is not.
What is allowed
- Research consultation and advisory work
- Literature review support and search-strategy design
- Data analysis and statistical analysis
- Research methodology consultation and research design
- Questionnaire and instrument development
- Data cleaning, coding and transformation
- Data visualisation
- Systematic review and meta-analysis support
- Research editing, proofreading and language support
- Referencing and citation management
- Research training, tutoring and skills coaching
- Manuscript preparation support
- Research proposal and grant consultation
What is prohibited
- Academic cheating of any kind
- Sitting, completing or assisting with an exam, test or timed assessment for someone else
- Completing assignments, coursework, theses or dissertations that are intended to be submitted as the requester's own work
- Fabricating research data, participants, samples or results
- Falsifying results, images, or analytical output
- Fabricating references or citing sources that do not exist or were not consulted
- Plagiarism, including submitting another's work or recycling work without disclosure
- Manipulating findings to reach a predetermined conclusion
- Buying or selling authorship
- Misrepresenting qualifications, affiliation or experience
- Anything that breaches the rules of an institution, funder, publisher or ethics committee
Research ethics
Where a project involves human subjects, animal subjects, or identifiable personal data, the client is responsible for holding the necessary ethical approval before the work begins, and for saying so in the brief.
An expert who believes a project requires approval that the client does not hold should decline it and may report it.
Responsible use of AI
AI tools are part of research practice now. Using them is not misconduct. Concealing their use, or letting them replace the intellectual contribution being claimed, is.
- Disclose AI assistance where the client, institution, funder or publisher requires disclosure.
- Never present AI-generated text as an expert's own analysis.
- Verify every citation. AI systems produce plausible references that do not exist; submitting one is fabrication regardless of where it came from.
- Do not paste confidential, unpublished or participant data into a third-party AI tool without authorisation.
Data integrity
Data must reflect what was actually collected or observed. Do not invent, duplicate, selectively delete, or alter data to change a result. Analysis choices should be defensible and disclosed. Where a result is inconclusive, say so. An honest null finding is a research output, not a failure to be engineered away.
Screening
Deliverables submitted through Researchor are screened automatically before the client sees them, and the result is shown to both parties.
A screening score is a signal, not a verdict. A low score does not certify that work is original, and a high score does not prove misconduct. Both parties should read it as one input among several. We are not going to describe it as a guarantee, because it is not one.
Reporting and consequences
Report a suspected breach through the report option on the project, or to [email protected].
Where we conclude this policy has been breached, we may:
- remove the project or deliverable;
- withhold or reverse payment through the Dispute Resolution process;
- restrict, suspend or permanently close the accounts involved;
- decline to return the service fee on the transaction.
We will tell you what we concluded and why, unless a legal obligation prevents it.
If you are a student
Researchor can legitimately help you learn a method, understand a literature, clean your dataset, check your statistics, or improve your writing. It cannot do your degree for you, and asking it to will get your account closed.
If you are unsure whether a request is allowed, read the Academic Guidelines, which work through concrete examples, or ask us before you post the project.
Questions about this document go to [email protected], or through the contact form.