A simple strategy of hunting for odd language errors might help finger fake research papers churned out by so-called paper mills, forensic metascientist James Heathers of the Medical Evidence Project reported here at the World Conference on Research Integrity. Heathers’s idea was kick-started last year, when someone sent him a dozen medical papers that seemed weirdly similar to one another, hoping Heathers could identify the problem. Heathers spent 2 days reading the papers and noticed a couple odd but common typos, spelling mistakes, and phrases.

When Heathers searched for these phrases in Google Scholar, he found about 200 more papers that shared multiple features with the original dozen, including the topic and specific design elements or graphics. That’s statistically improbable unless they all have the same source, he argues. Heathers suspects they’re all variants of the same paper, churned out and sold by a paper mill.


Source https://www.science.org/content/article/gotcha-odd-language-mistakes-may-help-identify-fake-papers

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