Five ways to spot when a paper is a fraud

• TECHNOLOGY FEATURE

• 25 February 2026

Five ways to spot when a paper is a fraud

Science sleuths share their common-sense tips for sniffing out fishy articles.

Stephanie Melchor0

Stephanie Melchor

Stephanie Melchor is a freelance science writer based in California.

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[Illustration showing a closeup of a person sniffing a scientific document where the scribbled text flows off the page to look like bad-smelling odour lines.]

Illustration: The Project Twins

From the low-quality output of paper mills to increasingly convincing content generated by artificial intelligence, peer reviewers are being inundated with questionable research manuscripts. A growing number of AI tools can detect fraudulent elements in papers, but they can be expensive to use. Such tools are probably better deployed by journal publishers rather than individual reviewers, says Elisabeth Bik, a science-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California, especially because feeding unpublished content into AI tools can compromise confidentiality and is generally frowned on during peer review.

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