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.