NEWS

New research integrity AI tool added
to Springer Nature’s growing portfolio

A new AI tool to identify irrelevant references in submitted manuscripts has been launched for use across Springer Nature’s journals and books. The tool is the latest AI-driven tool that has been developed in-house at Springer Nature to weed out problematic submissions and ensure the veracity of the publication record.

The tool will be used by Springer Nature’s Research Integrity Group (RIG) to assess submissions to almost all journals and books published by Springer Nature, analysing the relevance of each reference used. If a number of references are identified as irrelevant, the submission will be flagged to RIG who will manually check the manuscript and decide whether the submission should be withdrawn.

The irrelevant reference checker tool has undergone multiple rounds of testing and validation to ensure it provides a precise and reliable assessment of references across academic disciplines, and training and development of the tool will be ongoing. Human oversight will always remain in place, in line with Springer Nature’s AI Principles.

Chris Graf, Director of Research Integrity at Springer Nature, commented: “As the use of AI to generate fake research papers becomes more effective, reference checking provides a key opportunity to identify these unethical efforts. The addition of this tool to our existing checks will help us to catch many unethical submissions that would otherwise progress to take up editors’ and peer reviewers’ time.”

The launch of the irrelevant reference checker tool comes just ten months after the launch of two other AI tools to detect problematic submissions that Springer Nature has developed in-house. The first, Geppetto, supports the identification of papers that contain AI-generated fake content, the second, SnappShot, those that contain problematic images.

Graf added: “Fake research is a challenge that affects the entire publishing industry and is something that Springer Nature will not tolerate. From creating AI tools, to building a now 50-strong expert research integrity unit, to developing our employees’ and editors’ expertise through training, we are absolutely committed to ensuring the robustness of published research for researchers to build upon.”