A new trust signal: Cassyni talks in Signals

So far, our signals have focussed on research integrity — spotting potential issues in publications and manuscripts such as hallucinated references, authors with a history of misconduct or nonsensical content. This information has helped publishers to reject and retract articles. But a lack of problematic signals doesn’t necessarily make an article trustworthy. Publishers and researchers struggle to know which research they can trust, particularly from authors they don’t know. The result is that valuable research gets ignored and publishable work gets rejected.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce a new ‘positive’ signal into our products — one that helps publishers trust a manuscript submission, rather than reject it — the ‘Cassyni talk’ signal. 

Cassyni is a leading scholarly seminar platform. Every day researchers present their work to their peers, and those seminars are recorded and published on Cassyni. Cassyni’s unique technology is able to extract structured references from videos, linking talks directly to publications in the scholarly record.

LLMs have made it possible for anyone to produce a plausible-looking research manuscript. A talk is different. By personally presenting their work, researchers increase their trustworthiness. At a minimum, we know they are real. They are also willing to present their work and answer live questions, so it’s likely they actually did the work.

This layer of trust now flows into Signals, as Cassyni talk data is now included in the Signals Data Graph. Where the authors of a publication have an associated seminar, there will be a positive ‘Cassyni talk’ signal, with a link to the video of the talk.

The signal is also visible in Manuscript Checks. A manuscript submission won’t yet have a directly linked Cassyni talk, but its authors may have presented earlier work. If they have, the talk will be surfaced to editors, and the manuscript gains a level of trust. This tells them the authors are real, credible researchers. For a submission from a lab they don’t know, this is valuable.

You can find Cassyni signals on publications (like this one), and they are available now to customers of Signals Manuscript Checks. This is one of many upcoming positive signals from us that help build trust in scholarly research.

Book a demo to see how Signals Manuscript Checks can enhance decision-making and research integrity across your publishing workflow.