PeerTrust Brings Citation Forensics to Scientific Due Diligence

September 1, 2026 — A new public service lets insurance carriers, universities, science investors and funders look beyond citation counts and examine how citation impact was accumulated

LONDON, U.K., and FREDERICK, Md., U.S.A., 1 September 2026 — PeerTrust is now publicly available at PeerTrust.Report, giving science stakeholders a way to examine unusual patterns in the citation record behind a researcher’s scholarly profile.

Citations influence hiring, funding, promotion, institutional rankings and decisions about scientific partnerships. Yet those decisions often rely on how frequently a scientist has been cited, with little scrutiny of where those citations came from or how the surrounding network developed.

PeerTrust introduces Know Your Scientist (KYS), researcher-level scientific due diligence based on public scholarly records. The service examines three distinct anomaly types: unusual concentration of citation activity within a researcher’s coauthor network, repeated reciprocal citation relationships, and abrupt changes in publication output. It weighs these signals and produces an evidence-oriented report for human review.

“PeerTrust tells decision makers where unusual citation structures appear and gives them evidence they can inspect,” said Bassem Kadry, Chief Innovation Officer at ScienceWerx. “What that evidence means still requires context and human judgment.”

An unusual pattern is not a finding of misconduct. Close scientific collaboration, consortium publishing, changes in team size or rapid growth in research activity can all produce legitimate anomalies. PeerTrust is designed to identify records that warrant closer examination, not to infer intent or assign guilt.

The system has also undergone a computational reproducibility benchmark using a deliberately citation-enriched cohort of researchers identified through exceptionally highly cited recent publications. A separate team reimplemented the public PeerTrust methodology in Python and compared its results with the production system using identical preserved bibliographic evidence.

Both implementations returned the same final PeerTrust classification for all 260 researchers that could be scored. Across the complete set of benchmarked outputs, 258 of 260 cases matched exactly. The two remaining cases contained small numerical differences that did not change their classifications.

In the deliberately difficult test cohort, 116 of the 260 scored researchers received an ELEVATED or HIGH PeerTrust classification. The cohort was specifically constructed around unusually strong recent citation visibility to stress-test the system and cannot estimate how common citation manipulation or research misconduct is among scientists generally.

“Scientific due diligence often stops at publication and citation counts,” said Khalid Saqr of KNOWDYN. “If those numbers influence funding, appointments and partnerships, organizations should be able to examine the structure behind them before making consequential decisions.”

PeerTrust’s methodology separates automated anomaly detection from human judgment. The system organizes bibliometric evidence for review; it does not replace expert assessment, institutional investigation or due process.

PeerTrust is a transatlantic joint initiative of ScienceWerx and KNOWDYN. The public service is live now. PeerTrust is moving next into API access and institutional deployment and is identifying insurers, universities, research funders, investors, research-intelligence and research-integrity organizations interested in bringing Know Your Scientist into existing review and scientific due-diligence workflows.

Know Your Scientistpeertrust.report

PeerTrustScienceWerx, Inc. × KNOWDYN LTD