Can We Mathematically Spot Possible Manipulation of Results in Research Manuscripts Using Benford's Law?

The reproducibility of academic research has long been a persistent issue, contradicting one of the fundamental principles of science. What is even more concerning is the increasing number of false claims found in academic manuscripts recently, casting doubt on the validity of reported results. In this paper, we utilize an adaptive version of Benford's law, a statistical phenomenon that describes the distribution of leading digits in naturally occurring datasets, to identify potential manipulation of results in research manuscripts, solely using the aggregated data presented in those manuscripts. Our methodology applies the principles of Benford's law to commonly employed analyses in academic manuscripts, thus, reducing the need for the raw data itself. To validate our approach, we employed 100 open-source datasets and successfully predicted 79% of them accurately using our rules. Additionally, we analyzed 100 manuscripts published in the last two years across ten prominent economic journals, with ten manuscripts randomly sampled from each journal. Our analysis predicted a 3% occurrence of result manipulation with a 96% confidence level. Our findings uncover disturbing inconsistencies in recent studies and offer a semi-automatic method for their detection.