| Canonical name | Problematic Paper Screener |
| Also known as | PPS |
| Address | https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:1 |
| Operator | Guillaume Cabanac, Cyril Labbé, Alexander Magazinov op |
| Founded | 27 February 2021 |
| Kind | monitor |
| Roles | monitoring |
| Lifecycle | active |
| Observation | 2026-10-28: read |
| Unit | published paper flagged by a detector (tortured phrases, SCIgen, Mathgen, retracted or concerning references, and others) op |
| Intake | automated detectors over Crossref (with the Retraction Watch Database), Dimensions, PubMed and PubPeer op |
| Count | nearly 19,000 papers with five or more tortured phrases; more than 280 SCIgen papers; more than 70 with ChatGPT fingerprints; contributed to more than 1,000 retractions (as of The Conversation, 29 January 2025) op |
| Cadence | weekly scan of 130 million publications op |
op operator statement · 3p third-party report · obs our observation · rd our reading
It is a set of detectors run over the literature: tortured phrases (the output of paraphrasing tools, such as "Joined Together States" for "United States"), SCIgen and Mathgen papers, references that are annulled or under concern, and others. Its sources are Crossref with the Retraction Watch Database, Dimensions, PubMed and PubPeer. It scans 130 million publications a week.
By January 2025: nearly 19,000 papers with five or more tortured phrases, more than 280 SCIgen papers, more than 70 with ChatGPT fingerprints, and more than 764,000 articles citing retracted work. It has contributed to more than 1,000 retractions.
A detector finds what leaves a fingerprint. Text machine-written cleanly, or cited sources that exist but say something else, pass beneath it.
It is the scholarly record's automated immune response, and the neighbour of Academ-AI, which reads by phrase where the screener reads by detector.
| Records attribution? | partly: references to retracted or concerning works are flagged op |
Lee Sharks, ed. "Problematic Paper Screener." MMRS meta-aggregator, Machine-Mediated Reception Studies, compiled 2026-10-29. https://www.machinemediation.org/aggregators/problematic-paper-screener/
Record https://www.machinemediation.org/aggregators/problematic-paper-screener/ · entity https://www.machinemediation.org/aggregators/problematic-paper-screener/#entity