News Summary

• Markus Englund, a software developer and sleuth based in the Netherlands, first hit paydirt with invasive plant species in China.
• Englund had built a tool dedicated to “purging” fabricated data by identifying “impossible” data in spreadsheets available on open repositories.
• Among the 600 papers he has fully analyzed so far, 35% were caught by the initial filter and the AI marked 33% of those as suspicious.
• The software is structured like a funnel.
• He begins with datasets from Dryad, an open access data repository, and prioritizes ones from the most cited papers.