Guillaume Cabanac among the 10 outstanding scientists of 2021

The problem of fake news does not spare science. This is precisely what interests Guillaume Cabanac, selected by the prestigious magazine Nature in the Nature’s 10 list. This list highlights the 10 scientists who have marked the year 2021 and who have made significant progress in science. Guillaume Cabanac is a professor at Paul Sabatier University and is attached to the Data Management Department of IRIT. He is working on the development of efficient algorithms capable of identifying fake scientific publications.

Cleaning up the scientific literature

Dubbed “the detective of deception” by Nature, Guillaume Cabanac has designed algorithms that analyze massive amounts of data to detect false scientific publications. Fraud linked to the publication of false or plagiarized articles is a phenomenon that threatens the integrity of science and the credibility of researchers. This phenomenon concerns both small publishing houses and large international journals. The work of the teacher-researcher concerns in particular the detection of erroneous expressions in scientific publications, symptomatic of bad translations or paraphrases in order to plagiarize an original publication. Guillaume Cabanac describes this new form of plagiarism, undetected by software, as “pollution”. Scientists need to be able to rely on reliable sources to advance their research. Guillaume Cabanac details his approach by explaining that :

“My research focuses on the quantitative analysis of science via scientific literature mining. The goal is to generate new knowledge by designing and implementing algorithms that examine the millions of scientific articles published each year. This massive data is modeled as networks of words, authors, affiliations, bibliographic references and various metadata.”

To learn more, read the interview with Guillaume Cabanac on the Paul Sabatier University website.