Fraudulent science papers use more confusing language than genuine ones
Retractions Revisited: A Replication, Extension, and Mechanistic Evaluation of Linguistic Obfuscation Effects in Fraudulent Science
Computation and Language
Summary
Some scientific papers are written to hide fraud using complicated language. The authors checked 800 fake papers and 800 real ones from recent years and found that fake papers are harder to understand. They also found that the use of fewer descriptive words might explain why fake papers are more confusing. This work helps identify features that could detect fake scientific work automatically.
What this means in practice
- •For academic publishers: Improve screening processes by using language features to flag potentially fraudulent papers before publication.
- •For journal editors: Assist editors in identifying suspicious manuscripts that use unusually obfuscated language to conceal weak or fabricated research.
Authors
David M. Markowitz
Abstract
Prior work suggests fraudulent scientists write their articles with higher rates of linguistic obfuscation than genuine scientists, with a possible mechanism suggesting obfuscation makes research more costly for a reader to analyze. This result has not undergone additional empirical scrutiny in the open science era, nor have other psychological mechanisms been evaluated. The current replication and extension addressed this opportunity by comparing 800 fraudulent and 800 genuine control papers (2013-2025). The results supported the linguistic obfuscation hypothesis, suggesting fraudulent papers were more obfuscated than genuine ones. A parallel mediation model evaluated three competing mechanisms, finding that reality monitoring, as measured through decreased rates of adjectives, best explained the link between fraudulent science and linguistic obfuscation. Cross-validated detection accuracy using obfuscation features (60.7%) and an elastic net of over 100 language dimensions (71.6%) were significantly greater than chance. Implications for scientific fraud and psychology of language research are discussed.