IOPP's new Duplicate Review Checker. Credit: IOP Publishing

IOP Publishing (IOPP) has developed a machine-learning powered tool to help detect duplicate peer review reports, addressing a growing threat to research integrity in scholarly publishing.

Duplicate peer reviews (where the same reviewer report is sent for multiple submissions) are problematic because they fail to provide a unique and critical assessment of a manuscript, making the peer review unreliable. The most egregious examples of this are "review mills," organizations churning out fake reviews, often to inflate citations for a paying customer.

Until now, such patterns in reviewer reports have been difficult to identify, limiting publishers' ability to take timely action.…