The conference circuit, once lively with questioning and dialogue, now contends with a new problem: the “ghost academic”.
These are scholars whose names appear in conference programmes and proceedings, whose abstracts are listed, yet who never turn up to deliver their presentations.
They accrue the CV line, but never share the substance.
At first glance, this may seem a minor oddity, a logistical blip among myriad research meetings. But look closer and the phenomenon hints at deeper problems within higher education; changes driven by the mounting pressures of the marketised university.
These invisible delegates are not simply absent individuals, they are symptoms of a system that increasingly privileges the performance of productivity over the practice of scholarship, with worrying consequences for academic life and the exchange of knowledge.
The academic CV arms race
The last two decades have seen universities across the UK, and elsewhere, adopt an increasingly commercial approach to governance and funding. Driven by competition for students, research income, and global rankings, institutions have shifted towards a marketised logic in which outputs, metrics, and performative achievements are central. Performance is tracked through an ever-more elaborate system of audits, league tables, and key performance indicators.
For academics, this means living under the constant scrutiny, whether at a national level as in the REF (Research Excellence Framework), or internally through job criteria and annual reviews. The message is clear: career progression is tied to visible productivity. For early career researchers and established scholars alike, the need to have CVs brimming with publications, conference papers and other outputs has become existential.
The ghost academic emerges
It is within this climate that the ghost academic thrives. The defining feature is simple: the submission and acceptance of a conference abstract, sometimes even the appearance of a full paper in published proceedings, without any intention (or ability) to actually present at the conference. For academics faced with the paradox of decreased funding paired with ever-increasing demands of evidence of impact, having a conference paper publicly available from a conference which was never attended is one way to satisfy the metrics.
By simply having a paper accepted and your name in the programme, you can pad your achievements in your CV and cite the research as being delivered at an international or national event, regardless of whether you gave the talk, fielded questions, or participated in the event itself.
Sometimes, this “ghosting” is genuine. Travel plans change, funding falls through, or illness intervenes. Nobody begrudges a legitimate absence. But conference organisers increasingly report a more deliberate pattern: a growing number of accepted speakers who register for an event in order to secure their place, who don’t respond to follow-up communication and fail to turn up, without explanation. The paper often remains in the official record, granting the appearance of participation with none of the substance.
This is an escalation from another known practice: academics who attend conferences only to deliver their own paper, then promptly depart without engaging in the rest of the event. Ghost academics take it one step further, they do not bother to show up at all.
More than just an empty chair
It might be tempting to dismiss the rise of the ghost academic as an organisational nuisance, an inconvenience for conference planners and session chairs. But the long-term consequences are more profound. Conferences are not just mechanisms to present findings, they are vital spaces for academic exchange, where ideas evolve, collaborations form, and feedback improves research. When “ghosting” becomes common, it devalues these functions, turning conferences into mere career-filling rituals rather than platforms for genuine engagement.
The damage is most acute for those who stand to gain the most from conferences—early career researchers, postgraduate students, and scholars from underrepresented backgrounds. For them, conferences offer spaces to connect with mentors, get feedback on work in progress, and gain visibility in their fields. When speakers don’t show, or when panels are left half-empty, these opportunities diminish.
There is also a subtler, cultural cost: the erosion of academic citizenship. At its best, the academic conference represents a collective endeavour to advance knowledge through dialogue, questioning, and debate. The ghost academic is a warning sign that the culture is shifting from collegiality to calculation, from dialogue to box-ticking.
Rethinking academic incentives
If the rise of the ghost academic is the result of systemic pressures, it follows that only systemic change will address it. First, universities and research funders must reconsider how conference contributions are evaluated. Rather than relying solely on the number of acceptances or proceedings entries, hiring panels and promotion committees should reward substantive forms of participation, such as evidence of engagement in discussion, collaboration with other attendees, or contributions to follow-up outputs.
Some conference organisers are experimenting with stricter attendance and participation requirements: only registered attendees are permitted in the final programme; attendance is tracked; non-attending speakers are required to submit a video or withdraw altogether. Others are moving towards smaller, more genuinely interactive models, which foster engagement over mass participation.
Hybrid and virtual conferences, while easier to ghost, can be designed to promote accountability and inclusion. Live question sessions, post-event fora, and real-time engagement metrics offer ways to ensure that participants are more than names on a slide.
Ultimately, though, the solution must lie in a recalibration of values. As long as academic cultures reward the appearance of productivity over its substance, and as long as institutional structures idolise the performance of output, the ghost academic will remain. We must begin to value intellectual engagement—sharing, questioning, and collaboration, as much as, if not more than, abstract lines on a CV.
The spectre of the ghost academic serves as a potent warning for higher education. At stake is more than just the orderliness of conference schedules or the hassle faced by organisers. What is imperilled is the tradition of lively, open intellectual exchange that has long been the hallmark of scholarly life.
Addressing the rise of the ghost academic will not be easy. It will require courage from individuals to resist box-ticking, from institutions to rethink how they view publication and dissemination, and from the sector to restore the culture of engagement which gives academia its enduring value. Only by doing so can conferences reclaim their status as genuine meeting grounds—where knowledge is truly shared, tested, and brought to life.
I agree with most of this article. My only point of critique is on the following:
“First, universities and research funders must reconsider how conference contributions are evaluated. Rather than relying solely on the number of acceptances or proceedings entries, hiring panels and promotion committees should reward substantive forms of participation, such as evidence of engagement in discussion, collaboration with other attendees, or contributions to follow-up outputs.”
This will just add more bureaucracy which will again be gamed by the unscrupulous. What is needed is a culture change where these “ghosts” become pariahs in their university and their research community.
Can’t say I’ve come across this at all in the discipline I work in. Perhaps more of an issue in subjects where publications of proceedings are the norm; such publications carry much less weight in my field that books or journal articles. While I don’t condone the behaviour discussed in the piece, I do generally think that large, general academic conferences don’t really justify the expense of attending anymore in my case. With the job market so dire, the networking and ‘shop window’ incentive of these events has declined and with university finances tight, often the high cost of attending… Read more »
It seems to be true that ‘ghosting’ conferences has become more common/acceptable since COVID, but I find it hard to believe that there are scholars whose careers are legitimately benefiting from this. I know there are some fields where published conference proceeding are becoming more acceptable, but you still need to write to the thing to get it published and surely journal articles are still the main currency for hiring/promotions. As a postdoc one said to me, “there’s only 1 line that matters on your CV and that’s peer reviewed journal articles”. If there are indeed scholars faking conference attendance… Read more »
There are areas where conference papers are the main currency (Computer Science comes to mind). Of course in promotion cases people in such areas then run up against a (university) committee which discounts those publications as irrelevant….
Let’s not forget the financial difficulties involved in paying to attend – often there is a finite pot of money and even though your institution insists you must attend conferences they then refuse to fund attendance except for a select few, so you either have to find the £ yourself or realise you can’t go..
Quite. There are friends of mine I now meet rarely or never, because we used to meet at conferences and they now cannot get their universities to finance them. The original article also castigates those who turn up to give their own paper then go; a friend of mine was obliged to do this recently because her university would not finance her attendance, but by happy chance the conference venue was close enough to make a one-day attendance feasible – that one-day attendance was simply half a loaf.
Yes: one-day conference attendance is the precariously-employed, or employed-but-with-no conference-budget, or used-to-be-employed-but-now-redundant academic’s equivalent of the commuter student living at home, and therefore a phenomenon likely to increase in these straightened times. But it is an approach that can be taken with pride: one can participate wholeheartedly and collegially in the scholarly endeavours of a conference for a full day in a much more fulfilling way than online attendance, while skipping the expensive dinner and accommodation, without becoming like one of those Very Important Professors of yesteryear who just attended their own keynote. The most important thing is not so… Read more »