Check Integrity

ROLE: Lead UX Designer

TIMELINE: Fall 2023 – Spring 2025

BACKGROUND

Mass retractions of peer-reviewed research articles are increasingly common. This is a public relations nightmare for academic journal publishers. More critically, the negative impacts on research and researchers mean oft-irreversible damage for all users and consumers of fact-based science.

My squad was tasked with building a product to help remove these papers from the pre-publication pipeline.

GOALS

  • Intercept fraudulent manuscripts and metadata, and identify bad actors — especially ‘paper mills’ offering authorship for sale.

  • Determine submission’s viability in under 10 minutes.

  • Reduce editorial workload by removing submissions from journal workflows.

IMPACT

  • As of fall 2025, over 5000 fraudulent papers were identified and removed before publication.

  • On day one, with only one integrity signal (authorship changes) live across just 3 journals, we identified a new ‘paper mill.’

laying the foundation