Recently, I gave a presentation on the APIs for Papermill Detection offered by Clear Skies Ltd. I also touch on a newer service called the Clear Skies Standard Report. More on that in future posts… :) Here’s the video: Would you like to know more? There are a few more presentations coming up: I’ll be…

TL;DR: Join me at ConTech Live to hear about a recent project with Open Credo to see if we could detect unusual co-authorships in a dataset created by Anna Abalkina. Sign up here! Papermilling has a few definitions which you see here and there. Sometimes it’s “organised manipulation of the…

Also… what is an API? — The Papermill Alarm API, is a service which you can send some article metadata to and which will return an alert telling you if the paper looks like past papermill-products. Anyone can use it, but it definitely helps to have the support of an IT or data professional. (By the…

Dissecting a joke is a bit like dissecting a frog. No one needs to know what’s inside and the frog dies. — Jimmy Carr Last week, a paper I wrote on the subject of peer-review fraud was published in the journal Scientometrics (free link here, preprint here). It was an…

This post is about The Papermill Alarm: an API for detecting potential papermill-products. There’s a field of study called ‘stylometry’ where we look at the statistical properties of someone’s writing and use that to model their ‘style’. People write in idiosyncratic ways. So, for example, I often start sentences with…

I once saw a brilliant presentation about how simple data analysis can detect credit card fraud**. The presentation showed a pattern in how people use their credit cards. Given a large number of people who had been victims of credit card fraud, this pattern showed there was just 1 store…

The first time I flew over the North Atlantic was quite an experience. Through the clouds, I could see some little white boats out sailing in the sea. It was puzzling: from 30,000 feet, those boats must have been huge for me to be able to see them at all…

You want to submit a paper to a journal for consideration. It takes, say, 3 months on average for a paper to go through peer-review, so if your paper gets rejected, you’ve lost 3 months of your time. Wouldn’t it be better to hedge your bets? Submit the paper to…

Looking back, there’s a theme in a lot of misconduct cases which is duplication. Again and again, we see the same thing in 2 different places and it’s either evidence of misconduct or, at least a hint of where to look for it. I’ve seen pairs of papers, with different…