VANCOUVER, CANADA— A simple strategy of hunting for odd language errors might help finger fake research papers churned out by so-called paper mills, forensic metascientist James Heathers of the Medical Evidence Project reported here at the World Conference on Research Integrity last week. By automating the search for such errors, science sleuths could potentially identify large numbers of problematic papers. Heathers’s idea was kick-started last year, when someone sent him a dozen medical papers that seemed weirdly similar to one another, hoping Heathers could identify the problem. Heathers spent 2 days reading the papers and noticed a couple odd but common typos, spelling mistakes, and phrases.…