Retractions Revisited: A Replication, Extension, and Mechanistic Evaluation of Linguistic Obfuscation Effects in Fraudulent Science
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2610.13678 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Oct 2026]
Title:Retractions Revisited: A Replication, Extension, and Mechanistic Evaluation of Linguistic Obfuscation Effects in Fraudulent Science
Authors:David M. Markowitz
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Abstract:Prior work suggests fraudulent scientists write their articles with higher rates of linguistic obfuscation than genuine scientists, with a possible mechanism suggesting obfuscation makes research more costly for a reader to analyze. This result has not undergone additional empirical scrutiny in the open science era, nor have other psychological mechanisms been evaluated. The current replication and extension addressed this opportunity by comparing 800 fraudulent and 800 genuine control papers (2013-2025). The results supported the linguistic obfuscation hypothesis, suggesting fraudulent papers were more obfuscated than genuine ones. A parallel mediation model evaluated three competing mechanisms, finding that reality monitoring, as measured through decreased rates of adjectives, best explained the link between fraudulent science and linguistic obfuscation. Cross-validated detection accuracy using obfuscation features (60.7%) and an elastic net of over 100 language dimensions (71.6%) were significantly greater than chance. Implications for scientific fraud and psychology of language research are discussed.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2610.13678 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2610.13678v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.13678
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled Retractions Revisited: A Replication, Extension, and Mechanistic Evaluation of Linguistic Obfuscation Effects in Fraudulent Science, by David M. Markowitz
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