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.

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.

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.

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.

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.