The high-tech war on science fraud

The problem of fake data may go far deeper than scientists admit. Now a team of researchers has a controversial plan to root out the perpetrators

One morning last summer, a German psychologist named Mathias Kauff woke up to find that he had been reprimanded by a robot. In an email, a computer program named Statcheck informed him that a 2013 paper he had published on multiculturalism and prejudice appeared to contain a number of incorrect calculations - which the program had catalogued and then posted on the internet for anyone to see. The problems turned out to be minor - just a few rounding errors - but the experience left Kauff feeling rattled. "At first I was a bit frightened," he said. "I felt a bit exposed."

Kauff wasn't alone. Statcheck had read some 50,000 published psychology papers and checked the maths behind every statistical result it encountered. In the space of 24 hours, virtually every academic active in the field in the past two decades had received an email from the program, informing them that their work had been reviewed. Nothing like this had ever been seen before: a massive, open, retroactive evaluation of scientific literature, conducted entirely by computer.