On Wednesday 2/19 from 9-10 AM, CDWG will host Dr. Kivan Polimis for a research talk. Kivan Polimis is a Data Scientist at Karna and a lecturer in the Sociology Department at the University of Washington. Dr. Polimis is a computational demographer specializing in the use of non-traditional data such as social media to analyze population dynamics, with a focus on migration patterns. Dr. Polimis’ research leverages statistical frameworks that fuse novel and traditional demographic data to explore how digital interactions reflect demographic trends. The presentation will be entitled “Restoring Trust in Scholarly Research: Using Data-Driven Analysis of Retractions to Enhance Transparency and Accountability.”

Eroding trust in institutions across fields such as academia, journalism, public health, and government poses a significant threat to personal well-being and the integrity of knowledge production. While academia already relies on evaluations like peer-reviewed research, it can further enhance accountability by adopting tools that promote greater researcher accountability. For example, implementing tools to identify articles likely to be retracted due to critical errors or misconduct would help restore public trust in scholarly work. This project integrates data from multiple scholarly databases, including withdrarXiv, Scopus, and Google Citations, to track and analyze metrics of retracted academic articles. By using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques, the project aims to predict features of withdrawn articles, such as patterns in author behavior, publication fields, and citation dynamics. Additionally, an investigation into how problematic research spreads within academic communities by analyzing publication networks, author movement, and citation relationships is ongoing. The findings presented here are preliminary.