TL;DR: peer-review times appear to have been growing for a long time. The effects of COVID-lockdowns on peer-review are surprising. A few months ago, I was invited to referee a research paper. So, I guess the editor thought that I was one of the 2 best people in the entire world to review this thing. That’s how it works, right?
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?Some dummy data to illustrate the point. Interesting aside: we actually use dummy data like this all the time as we develop processes at Clear Skies.
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.Image from https://www.pxfuel.com/en/free-photo-xwmxj You know how data scientists make predictions?
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? How accurate is your measurement? Are you including fur in the measurement? What if Ralph were to stand on his hind legs, like a mighty bear — how tall would he be then?
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 happening in physics, so perhaps physics seemed special to him.
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.
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.
Also… what is an API?API keys come in many forms. Source: wiki commons 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.
Dissecting a joke is a bit like dissecting a frog. No one needs to know what’s inside and the frog dies.
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.
