New Study Develops Detection Tool to Identify Cheating Scientists and Fake Academic Papers.
Researchers from the University of St Andrews suggest that auditing practices from the finance industry can be adapted to identify academic fraud. The paper looks at Benford's Law as a means of examining the relative frequency distribution for leading digits of numbers in datasets, which is used in the practice of professional auditing. The authors hope this paper will serve as an introduction to such tools for anyone wishing to challenge the integrity of a dataset, not just in financial data, but in any field that generates lots of data.