AI-rewritten paper on nonexistent Ottoman 1918 elections exposed as academic fraud

Afinetheorem · x · 2026-09-22

Economic historian Mark Koyama exposes an elaborate fraud: a submitted paper on "the Ottoman Elections of 1918" — elections that never existed. The author AI-rewrote a JCE paper on industrialization and the Russian Revolution, keeping the data intact, so regressions still featured "distance to Petrograd" and "distance to Moscow" and maps carried Russian coordinates. Koyama calls it a sign of "the new age of academic fraud," and Afinetheorem argues journals should require a public, permanent, name-tied draft for every submission.

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