Searching for Research Fraud in OpenAlex with Graph Data Science

The OpenAlex dataset is a vast graph of data describing researchers, research papers, institutions, journals and more. It is known that some organisations exist which offer authorship slots on research papers for sale. Authors of research papers are required to contribute to the research described in the paper, so paying for an authorship slot is a form of research misconduct. Given a dataset of research papers, where it is known that authorship slots were sold in this way, we use OpenAlex and Neo4J hosted on Google Cloud Platform to analyse data relating to these papers and take a first step towards automated detection of such unusual co-authorships.