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Comparing the topological properties of real and artificially generated scientific manuscripts

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  • Diego Raphael Amancio

    (University of São Paulo)

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the increase of competition in science. While promoting the quality of research in many cases, an intense competition among scientists can also trigger unethical scientific behaviors. To increase the total number of published papers, some authors even resort to software tools that are able to produce grammatical, but meaningless scientific manuscripts. Because automatically generated papers can be misunderstood as real papers, it becomes of paramount importance to develop means to identify these scientific frauds. In this paper, I devise a methodology to distinguish real manuscripts from those generated with SCIGen, an automatic paper generator. Upon modeling texts as complex networks (CN), it was possible to discriminate real from fake papers with at least 89 % of accuracy. A systematic analysis of features relevance revealed that the accessibility and betweenness were useful in particular cases, even though the relevance depended upon the dataset. The successful application of the methods described here show, as a proof of principle, that network features can be used to identify scientific gibberish papers. In addition, the CN-based approach can be combined in a straightforward fashion with traditional statistical language processing methods to improve the performance in identifying artificially generated papers.

Suggested Citation

  • Diego Raphael Amancio, 2015. "Comparing the topological properties of real and artificially generated scientific manuscripts," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 105(3), pages 1763-1779, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:105:y:2015:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-015-1637-z
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-015-1637-z
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    4. Dejian Yu & Wanru Wang & Shuai Zhang & Wenyu Zhang & Rongyu Liu, 2017. "Hybrid self-optimized clustering model based on citation links and textual features to detect research topics," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 12(10), pages 1-21, October.
    5. Guillaume Cabanac & Cyril Labbé, 2021. "Prevalence of nonsensical algorithmically generated papers in the scientific literature," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(12), pages 1461-1476, December.
    6. Shang, Ronghua & Zhang, Weitong & Zhang, Jingwen & Feng, Jie & Jiao, Licheng, 2022. "Local community detection based on higher-order structure and edge information," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 587(C).
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