An artificial intelligence (AI) tool that scans manuscript titles and abstracts has flagged more than 250,000 cancer studies that bear textual similarities to articles that are known to have been produced by paper mills. These businesses produce fake or low-quality research papers and sell authorships. Articles produced by paper mills often include fabricated data, duplicated images and weird phrases, which are strange wording choices used to evade plagiarism detectors. Integrity specialists and sleuths can spot these flaws, but the process is time-consuming and, in many cases, the involvement of paper mills cannot be proven so quantifying the scale of the problem is difficult. But, paper mills probably rely on boilerplate templates to mass produce papers, says Adrian Barnett, a statistician at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, which could be detected by large language models (LLMs) that analyse patterns in texts. Barnett and his colleagues developed a...
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