Linguistic document research technologies (forensic and procedural aspects)

Linguistic examination is a modern type of forensic examination, which is directly related to the study of the products of speech activity in order to establish facts (circumstances) of evidentiary significance in a particular (criminal, civil and administrative) case. Although linguistic knowledge is often useful, author identification has not yet reached a significant level of reliability. The main purpose of the study is to investigate the current state of legal regulation of document linguistic examination in Ukraine and to disclose the criminal and procedural aspects of linguistic technologies of document examination. The research process involved using a combination of general scientific, philosophical and specialised scientific methods, which are in line with the aims and objectives set by the authors. The philosophical basis of the methodological paradigm of the study is the dialectic as a philosophical learning method. The author's conclusion provided a conceptual understanding of the implementation of document linguistic examination in Ukraine.

Software review: The JATSdecoder package—extract metadata, abstract and sectioned text from NISO-JATS coded XML documents; Insights to PubMed central’s open access database

JATSdecoder is a general toolbox which facilitates text extraction and analytical tasks on NISO-JATS coded XML documents. Its function JATSdecoder() outputs metadata, the abstract, the sectioned text and reference list as easy selectable elements. One of the biggest repositories for open access full texts covering biology and the medical and health sciences is PubMed Central (PMC), with more than 3.2 million files. This report provides an overview of the PMC document collection processed with JATSdecoder(). The development of extracted tags is displayed for the full corpus over time and in greater detail for some meta tags. Possibilities and limitations for text miners working with scientific literature are outlined. The NISO-JATS-tags are used quite consistently nowadays and allow a reliable extraction of metadata and text elements. International collaborations are more present than ever. There are obvious errors in the date stamps of some documents. Only about half of all articles from 2020 contain at least one author listed with an author identification code. Since many authors share the same name, the identification of person-related content is problematic, especially for authors with Asian names. JATSdecoder() reliably extracts key metadata and text elements from NISO-JATS coded XML files. When combined with the rich, publicly available content within PMCs database, new monitoring and text mining approaches can be carried out easily. Any selection of article subsets should be carefully performed with in- and exclusion criteria on several NISO-JATS tags, as both the subject and keyword tags are used quite inconsistently.

A dangerous triangularization of conflicting values in academic publishing: ORCID, fake authors, and risks with the lack of criminalization of the creators of fake elements

The mainstream publishing establishment is under attack from multiple known and unknown forces. This is neither hyperbole nor fantasy. Many academics may believe that the main threat lies with “predatory” journals or publishers, but this is not necessarily the case because such entities are not always easy to distinguish clearly from veritable scholarly journals or publishers. Moreover, there is a gray zone that may involve both predatory and exploitative qualities. Current submission systems are not fail-safe because they allow unscholarly or fraudulent elements to register and abuse them, for example for submitting fake research or falsified peer reports, while author identification tools like ORCID are imperfect and provide a platform for similar-minded individuals to “validate” themselves. This toxic mix of tools aimed at fortifying integrity, while allowing fake authors to breed, currently without many, or any, ethical or legal repercussions will rapidly erode the entire publishing landscape if serious legal action is not taken. The creation of fake papers by fake authors will eventually trickle down into valid literature, by virtue of the fact that cited literature cannot be thoroughly vetted, even in peer review. The integrity of valid scholarly venues is thus at high risk unless suitable, strict and ethically and legally enforceable preventative measures are implemented.

Cross-Topic Author Identification -- a Case Study on Swedish Literature

Using material from the Swedish Literature Bank, we investigate whether common methods of author identification using word frequencies and part of speech frequencies are sensitive to differences in topic. The results show that this is the case, thereby casting doubt on much previous work in author identification. This sets the stage for a broader future study, comparing other methods and generalising the results.