  Comments received from referees during peer-review were analysed to determine
the rates of duplication and partial duplication. It is very unusual for 2
different referees to submit identical comments, so the rare cases where this
happens are of interest. In some cases, it appears that paper-mills create fake
referee accounts and use them to submit fake peer-review reports. These include
comments that are copied and pasted across multiple reviews. Searching for
duplication in referee comments is therefore an effective method to search for
misconduct generally, since the forms of misconduct committed by paper-mills go
beyond peer-review fraud. These search methods allow the automatic detection of
misconduct candidates which may then be investigated carefully to confirm if
misconduct has indeed taken place. There are innocent reasons why referees
might share template reports, so these methods are not intended to
automatically diagnose misconduct.
