Universities may attract penalty, including a freeze of grants, if its teachers are found to be guiding more than eight PhD students at any given point in time as part of a drive to plug lacunae in research. The University Grants Commission will ask all universities to have anti-plagiarism software to ensure that the thesis papers reflect genuine research. The step assumes significance against the backdrop of some agencies offering their services to research scholars to draft theses for them for a fee.

A new Ministry of Education regulation to punish academic fraud has come into effect to clamp down on plagiarism and fabricating research data, as well as buying, selling or organizing trade in academic degree theses, including all forms of "ghostwriting" or buying of materials produced by essay mills.

Strong demand for ghost-written academic papers in the lead-up to university graduation and revelations that people pay to have scholarly articles published are worrying critics who fear the billion-yen industry is making it harder than ever to evaluate graduates' abilities.