Adam Day

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.

We need a chat about ChatGPT

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.


(The?) 3 kinds of papermills

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? Flattered, I flagged the editor’s email to signal its importance and I got straight to work!

Is science getting slower?

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?

Where to draw the line? Precision and recall

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:  https://medium.com/media/ee5a04aaed9fc53d2748e64516178ebe/href Would you like to know more?

Video: APIs for Papermill detection (ConTech API Series)

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.

How to use the Papermill Alarm API

TL;DR: We can detect individuals with a high probability of being involved in milling papers. The question is: how should we respond?  A few years ago, my bike was stolen. It was an organised job. The thieves arrived after dark, cut a hefty lock clean off, and my bike disappeared silently forever. I imagined it dismantled and sold off into some vast black market network. Poor bike. The police admitted that they weren’t going to do anything.

Keystone: papermill detection with network analysis

TL;DR: The current version of the Papermill Alarm detects signals in 98.9% of the Hindawi retractions conducted over the last 12 months.** It’s never nice to see the harms caused by papermills, but it is good to see independent verification of the Papermill Alarm’s predictions.

Here’s a question: Why are there 2 multi-squillion-euro detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider?

Predicting retractions with the Papermill Alarm

So, we’ve established that papermills like to use templates. We see templates in referee reports and in the text of cookie-cutter research papers. There’s an important insight here: Templates are used in legit academic behaviour as well as in industrial research fraud. So we need to be careful — we can’t assume that templates are necessarily a sign of research fraud.

Thank you for your warm work… earnestly

TL;DR: the rate of Papermill Alarm alerts is significantly higher in gold OA content than it is in subscription content. If you’re concerned about papermills, Clear Skies offers the Papermill Alarm: the world’s leading papermill detection tool. Get in touch for a demo. I’m a big believer in Open Science.

Papermills prefer Open Access

There’s this phrase used by some technologists: ‘epistemic security’. Epistemic security has to do with things like the spreading of misinformation on social media. I.e. if we spend enough time on social media reading unreliable information, how does that influence us? That’s a matter of epistemic security. Epistemic security is interesting because if you start a conversation about epistemic security at a party, they don’t invite you back.

The Papermill Alarm

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?

Cast a wide net

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 in-particular where they had all used their cards. There was no

 observational evidence

of someone at that store stealing card details.

Patterns and Evidence (and how to find papermills before peer-review)

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.

How to find all the papermills (step 1)

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?

The definition of plagiarism

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 interesting project to work on. I found a lot of examples where one referee would write a report during peer-review and then another referee would write an identical report in some other peer-review of some other paper.

Papermills in peer-review

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.

The Papermill Alarm: Patterns in PubMed

Stories by Adam Day on Medium

<figure>
<img
src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*P561-73RvXTNZdUW" />
<figcaption>When life gives you cookie-cutters… (<a
href="https://pixexid.com/image/intricately-decorated-gingerbread-men-cascade-down-at-an-angle-against-a-soft-gr-gcdfeueu">image
CC-BY by ‘Unreal’</a>)</figcaption>
</figure>

So, we've established that papermills like to use templates. [We see
templates in referee reports](https://medium.com/p/c507b12aa4ac) and [in
the text of cookie-cutter research
papers](https://medium.com/p/90b10fb8a6cc). There's an important
insight here:

- Templates are used in legit academic behaviour as well as in
 industrial research fraud. So we need to be careful --- we can't
 assume that templates are necessarily a sign of research fraud.
- But if a signal is part of an industrial process, it will be much more
 common than a signal in research outputs because it is much cheaper
 and faster to produce fake research industrially than it is to do real
 research, so the volume is higher.

This wasn't obvious to me at first, but it seems self-evident now and it
applies to a lot of the templates I've picked up.

### Templates in author correspondence

But what about *author correspondence*? Here's where it gets
interesting.

Around a year ago, I was looking at some author correspondence which had
been published by journals using transparent peer-review. It happened
that the data I was looking at was a set of papers that I already knew
was likely to be milled.

I noticed in the author correspondence that *thousands* of different
authors had used a phrase something like 'thank you for your warm work'
in response to a round of referee reports.

It's clearly a grammatical error, but for thousands of authors to make
the same error seems highly unlikely. It must be a template.

Here are some examples in
[Google](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22warm+work+earnestly%22) and
[Google
Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22warm+work+earnestly%22&btnG=).
In fact, just try Googling:

> site:somepublisher.domain "warm work earnestly"

...and you will see how common this template is.

So we know that papermills are using this template in their
correspondence. (In fact, it's a *set* of templates covering all
author-journal interactions.) *Smoking gun, right?* All we need to do is
search for this phrase and others from that set of templates and we'll
find loads of milled papers! Right....?

Wrong!

That's actually exactly what I did. I searched for and then manually
sifted through dozens of these papers and, besides the ones that I
started with, I couldn't find a lot of obvious signs of fraud.

[With a little digging, I found the same templates being shared online
as far back as
2011](https://blog.csdn.net/flyingworm_eley/article/details/6522329).
So, it looks like these templates are actually in widespread use and,
while mills do use them, the templates appear to also be used in the
correspondence of legitimate papers.

Would I recommend that editors look out for these templates? Yes. I
think editors should be aware that this pattern exists, but I'd caution
against basing a decision on this particular signal alone. Most of the
time, the 'warm work' papers seem to be fine and using a template isn't
a problematic thing to do in author correspondence. I would also
recommend that authors use template correspondence if it helps them to
get honest work published.

Going back to what I said at the start, it seems likely there is some
industrial process involved, but that could still be a lot of innocent
things (as well as papermills).

The most recent site that I found offering these templates is
[citexs.com](https://www.citexs.com/SkillsDes?Id=20&title=SCI%20%E6%8A%95%E7%A8%BF%E5%90%84%E9%98%B6%E6%AE%B5%E7%9A%84%E7%94%B5%E5%AD%90%E9%82%AE%E4%BB%B6%E6%A8%A1%E6%9D%BF%E9%9B%86%E5%90%88).
Opening up that site was like lifting up a rock, finding a swarm of bugs
and then hastily putting the rock back. How big does the need for
services like automated paraphrasing, plagiarism detection (*for
authors*) and AI-weight-reduction have to be for a site like this
to exist?

Food for thought.

I'd like to thank Sholto David for helping look into the warm work
papers in recent weeks. I recommend [his YouTube
channel](https://www.youtube.com/@Sholto_David) and [this recent
interview with him in the
Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/29/sholto-david-biologist-finds-flaws-in-scientific-papers).

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