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A PLoS ONE paper on language patterns in fraudulent papers has sparked social-media speculation about new ways to spot dishonest work. Researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, took advantage of a singular resource to study the linguistics of fraud: the collected works of Diederik Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist who confessed to faking data in many of his papers. The Cornell team analysed papers that had been deemed fraudulent by three investigative committees, and compared them with his genuine publications. They found that the falsified papers had a linguistic signature. Among other things, they tended to have fewer qualifying words (such as 'possibly') and more amplifying words such as 'extremely'. “Lucky he had enough false papers for analysis!” tweeted Grace Lindsay, a neuroscience graduate student at Columbia University in New York City. See go.nature.com/uxaina for more.