The Papermill Alarm draws a line between papers which have the characteristics of papermill-products and those that don’t. Given data like that shown below, where red dots represent papermill-products and green dots represent normal papers, where should we draw that line? Limit the spread There’s well-known (and fun!) thought experiment in statistics that…

TL;DR: There’s been a recent major upgrade to the private Papermill Alarm. It looks like we can predict the inclusion of journals on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) lists. You know how data scientists make predictions? I’ll let you in on a secret: no they don’t. No one can…

This is Ralph. How tall is Ralph? It seems simple, you could just hold a ruler up to the screen. But when you look at the ruler and use it to measure Ralph, are you actually measuring Ralph, or are you measuring the ruler and using that as a proxy…

There’s a quote attributed to Ernest Rutherford: “That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting”. I think his point was that a lot of scientific work is just documenting things. In Rutherford’s day, there was a lot of exciting new creative work…

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…