Five ways to spot when a paper is a fraud

The good news is that recognizing a problematic manuscript is “way easier than you would believe”, says Stephanie Melchor in this paper published on “Nature”. Then she lists some strategies that can help, which include the careful check of Authors’ affiliations and references, the detection of falsified data, the clear use of AI-generated text without disclosing it, and the use of the so-called “tortured phrases”, i.e. strange expressions that result from replacing each word in an established scientific term with synonyms to avoid plagiarism detectors. Finally, the Author recommends using existing tools, such as the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG), to identify integrity issues and, in case, contacting the editor of the journal.

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Nature. 25 February 2026

Recommended on behalf of EASE by Silvia Maina, Italy