Communication

Linguistic Obfuscation in Fraudulent Science

2016
Publisher
Journal of Language and Social Psychology
Linguistic obfuscation in fraudulent science

Abstract: The rise of scientific fraud has drawn significant attention to research misconduct across disciplines. Documented cases of fraud provide an opportunity to examine whether scientists write differently when reporting on fraudulent research. In an analysis of over two million words, we evaluated 253 publications retracted for fraudulent data and compared the linguistic style of each paper to a corpus of 253 unretracted publications and 62 publications retracted for reasons other than fraud (eg, ethics violations). Fraudulent papers were ...