Frederick, Md. – September 12, 2026 -- PeerTrust has launched a public researcher due-diligence service, PeerTrust.Report, that flags anomalies in citation records used by universities, research funders, insurers and science investors to make hiring, funding and partnership decisions.
Know Your Scientist tool screens for three citation anomaly types
The new Know Your Scientist (KYS) module examines coauthor network concentration, reciprocal citation relationships, and abrupt publication velocity changes. PeerTrust weighs these signals into an evidence-based report intended for human review rather than automated verdicts. An unusual pattern does not constitute a finding of misconduct, as legitimate factors such as consortium publishing or rapid team growth can also generate anomalies.
Reproducibility benchmark matches results across 258 of 260 test cases
A separate team reimplemented PeerTrust's public methodology in Python and compared outputs against the production system using identical bibliographic evidence. Both implementations produced identical final classifications for all 260 scored researchers, with 258 of 260 cases matching exactly and the remaining two showing only minor numerical differences that did not alter classification.
Stress-test cohort shows 116 of 260 researchers flagged as elevated or high risk
The benchmark used a deliberately citation-enriched cohort selected for exceptionally highly cited recent publications to stress-test the system. Within that cohort, 116 of 260 scored researchers received an ELEVATED or HIGH PeerTrust classification. PeerTrust noted the test group was constructed to be difficult and cannot be used to estimate the prevalence of citation manipulation or misconduct among scientists generally.
ScienceWerx and KNOWDYN target institutional and API deployment next
PeerTrust is a joint initiative of ScienceWerx and KNOWDYN, now seeking insurers, universities, research funders, investors, and research-integrity organizations to integrate KYS into existing due-diligence workflows via planned API access and institutional deployment. "PeerTrust tells decision makers where unusual citation structures appear and gives them evidence they can inspect," said Bassem Kadry, Chief Innovation Officer at ScienceWerx, adding that interpreting the evidence still requires context and human judgment.