By The Numbers

June 29, 2017 – 2:33 pm

Here’s an interesting angle: using Benford’s Law to spot falsified data in academic papers.

Posted by Malcolm on at 2:33 pm, filed under Science, Curiosities. RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

One Comment

  1. Bill says

    I read several years ago that this was being used in accounting audits, that falsified numbers are found this way. I know that when I used to make up test data, I had a tendency to use numbers that were too much alike. Interesting that this is being applied to scientific publications. It is possible that the precision can be improved if they were to use third and fourth digits for comparison. Auditors use all digits.

    Posted June 30, 2017 at 9:51 am | Permalink

Post a Comment

Your email is never shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*