In my ideal world, every promotion (eg full professor) or large personal grant committee would have two paid sleuths that go through/sample candidates' CVs for sloppyness and QRPs. What do sleuths think of that? We would need a database of people and a concept of what a basic CV check looks like.
Mar 13, 2026 at 1:40 PM
Scientific sleuths come in from the cold
Research integrity investigators are starting to organize, but the field, and the people, remain idiosyncratic
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...
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…
An Open Audit
How does a lightweight community Certification Authority ("CA") engage in the heavyweight world of PKI and secure browsing?
Q&A from the slop trenches – GeoSpatial ML
We reviewed 22 ML conference submissions this summer. Fifteen had fabricated citations, hallucinated authors, or clear LLM slop, so we complain about that a bit, and release the paper references audit we now run.
Can AI Detectors Be Trusted?
Society has always trusted editors, teachers, peer reviewers, and readers to set acceptable standards for writing. In the past, the biggest challenge was detecting plagiarism and cracking down on other forms of cheating. Now, AI detectors are rewriting the script: they assign a score based on the likelihood that the text was created by a human or a large language model (LLM).
Immigration agents used racial slurs during LA sweeps, court records show
Records released as part of a lawsuit challenging racial profiling show that immigration agents used slurs to refer to Latino targets.
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.
Same company verifies mugshots for ChatGPT, and offers 269 surveillance checks for US government
The identity verification company used by ChatGPT and other major services accidentally exposed its government-authorized platform, which is capable of extensive surveillance.
I have many questions about this. What if the sleuth finds nothing, embarks on a project that leads to nothing? How will the validation happen? What happened to old terms like research integrity? And finally, should we perhaps reflect a bit (I would say even worry) about the incentive being set up?
Retraction Watch
We're thrilled to announce the creation of the Retraction Watch Sleuth in Residence Program.
And for context, here are the sleuths' profiles in other outlets: thetransmitter.org/publishing/retraction-she-wro… zmescience.com/science/the-rise-of-the-scien… These people are pros.
Retraction, She Wrote: Dorothy Bishop’s life after research
www.thetransmitter.orgI don't see the point in giving sleuths credit for retractions. It doesn't seem like a good way of valuing labour and also further turns retractions into a kind of weird moral economy.
Noticed: Sleuths are starting to get credit for retractions
retractionwatch.comLots of scepticism about codes of ethics in this piece but surely the work of sleuthing needs to be grounded in some kind of observable, ethical process. Otherwise it's just as opaque and unscientific as the stuff it's investigating.
Dalmeet Singh Chawla
Research sleuths are starting to organize, but the field, and the people, remain idiosyncratic — my latest for @cenmag.bsky.social: cen.acs.org/research-integrity/scientific… @mcintold.bsky.social, @reeserichardson.bsky.social, @elisabethbik.bsky.social, @sholtodavid.bsky.social, @eugenie-reich.bsky.social
