Scientific sleuths come in from the cold

Research integrity investigators are starting to organize, but the field, and the people, remain idiosyncratic

A journal named a sleuth in a correction. The sleuth says that was ‘ethical editorial malpractice’

As the publishing community debates the merits of naming sleuths in retraction or correction notices, one journal did so without the sleuth’s permission — by publishing an email from the authors na…

Researchers | alphaXiv

Browse researcher profiles on alphaXiv: publications, citation metrics, research areas, and the papers behind them.

Introducing COSIG: The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides

Investigating the integrity of published scientific papers is key to the scientific process, but the necessary knowledge is in short supply. We present COSIG, an open collection of meta-scientific guides enabling anyone to perform forensic peer review.

Unequal Scientific Recognition in the Age of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping how scientific knowledge is accessed and represented. This study evaluates the extent to which popular and frontier LLMs including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro recognize scientists, benchmarking their outputs against OpenAlex and Wikipedia. Using a dataset focusing on 100,000 physicists from OpenAlex to evaluate LLM recognition, we uncover substantial disparities: LLMs exhibit selective and inconsistent recognition patterns. Recognition correlates strongly with scholarly impact such as citations, and remains uneven across gender and geography. Women researchers, and researchers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America are significantly underrecognized. We further examine the role of training data provenance, identifying Wikipedia as a potential sources that contributes to recognition gaps. Our findings highlight how LLMs can reflect, and potentially amplify existing disparities in science, underscoring the need for more transparent and inclusive knowledge systems.

A Delphi survey on attitudes to serious research misconduct: Exploring convergence vs. polarization of views of research “sleuths” and research integrity experts

Research fraud is often seen as a rare event, but evidence from self-report surveys indicates that fabrication and falsification of data are common enough to be a problem. This study assessed attit...

Beyond APIs: Collecting Web Data for Research using the National Internet Observatory

Widespread Internet use offers unprecedented opportunities to study human behavior at scale, yet researchers face significant ethical and technical barriers when attempting to collect data for academic studies.

In an era where research evaluation methods are evolving, the Research Contribution Claim Network makes trustworthy tracking of non-traditional research output easy!

In this whitepaper, Patrick Hochstenbach (Ghent University Library), Thomas van Himbergen (SURF), Laurents Sesink (SURF) and Herbert Van de Sompel (DANS) introduce the...

The Research Nexus vision for a more connected scholarly community

Crossref envisions “a rich and reusable open network of relationships connecting research organizations, people, things, and actions; a scholarly record that the global community can build on forever, for the benefit of society”. This Research Nexus expands on the importance of research objects being persistently and uniquely identified. The scholarly community has an established practice of connecting things such as citations to others’ work and it is increasingly critical to identify relationships beyond citations, bringing together published work, unpublished work, institutions, individuals, and identifying the actions that they take e.g., funding, publishing, creating, modifying, citing, and sharing. The Research Nexus brings together metadata and relationships to build a joined-up picture of the scholarly ecosystem and helps everyone identify these relationships and how they change through time. This vision is possible if all parts of the scholarly ecosystem (and beyond) work together, including various scholarly infrastructure organizations.

Home | Bellingcat's Online Investigation Toolkit

A toolkit for open source researchers