Phys.org April 13, 2023
Procedures for monitoring the trustworthiness of research, and for investigating cases where concern about possible data fraud have been raised are not well established. Based on the well-established practices of financial auditing, researchers in the UK have suggested a practical approach for the investigation of work suspected of fraudulent data manipulation using Benford’s Law. They provided synthesis of the literature on tests of adherence to Benford’s Law, culminating in advice of a single initial test for digits in each position of numerical strings within a dataset. They recommend further tests which may prove useful if specific hypotheses regarding the nature of data manipulation could be justified. Their advice differed from the most common current implementations of tests of Benford’s Law. They applied the approach to previously published data, highlighting the efficacy of these tests in detecting known irregularities. They discussed the results of the tests, with reference to their strengths and limitations. According to the researchers their method should be of value to both individual peer-reviewers and academic institutions and journals… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
… Graphical depiction of Benford’s Law as applied to the first digits of a notional dataset that perfectly fits the law… Credit: Research Integrity and Peer Review volume 8, Article number: 1 (2023)