‘Tortured Phrases’ Detector
Articles matching 5+ tortured phrases or 1+ obvious tortured phrases (e.g., sign to clamor).
The table below thus displays a 3% subset of all articles found with at least one tortured phrase.
📄 Cabanac, G., Labbé, C., & Magazinov, A. (2022). “Bosom peril” is not “breast cancer”: How weird computer-generated phrases help researchers find scientific publishing fraud.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Online
📄 Cabanac, G., Labbé, C., & Magazinov, A. (2021). Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals.
arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2107.06751 (supplementary materials) ▷ Featured in Nature (Else, 2021)
📄 Swart, W., Cabanac, G., Fraisier-Vannier, O., & Hubert, G. (2025). How a Tortured Conference Becomes a Series: An Analysis of Conference Manipulations.
In 2025 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), pp. 11–19. https://doi.org/10.1109/jcdl67857.2025.00012 (open access)
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