I am currently on a job search. If you’re looking to work with someone who has the technical chops to answer tough questions about the scientific record, please reach out! I would love to talk more! (cnsodano@gmail.com).

Christian N Sodano

Bluesky Github

Summary

I’m an independent researcher currently working in the emerging field of forensic metascience1 and scientometrics2, developing tools to detect and prevent breaches of research integrity including questionable research practices3, statistical and methodological errors4, and fraud5. Prior to working in metascience, I did my Bachelor’s in Computer Science with a minor specialization in Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina where I researched automatic sleep spindle detection algorithms and the cognitive/clinical effects of non-invasive brain stimulation.

My current projects in this area focus on automating reproducibility checks, detecting so-called paper-mills (businesses conducting for-profit research fraud at large-scale) and journal hijackings, as well as authors who game citations for personal benefit and papers that are unknowingly citing discredited research.

Collaborations

I’m openly exploring collaborations, so please reach out if are looking for collaborators to:

  • Turn basic analysis scripts/forensic tools into interactive tools that can help the scientific community

  • Aggregate scholarly fulltext and metadata for textual analyses or systematic reviews

  • Explore metascientific questions that require natural language processing of scholarly text

  • Write grant proposals for projects in the fields of scientific error detection or scientometrics

Techniques

I use openly accessible APIs to extract and analyze scholarly metadata from a variety of sources (Scopus, OpenAlex, Crossref) and analyze trends. I also perform natural language processing on full-text data of open access articles (e.g. PubMed Open Access Corpus) and peer reviews. I have implemented anomaly detectors using various techniques, including data-driven approaches, time-frequency techniques, and neural networks.

Some more techie stuff

I mainly code in Python, using the open-source pandas library for data cleaning and numpy and scikit-learn for machine learning. I use spaCy for more advanced NLP applications. For scientometrics, I’ve used VOSviewer, and recently pybibx6. For demonstrating analysis pipelines in a portable and interactive format, I am favoring Marimo notebooks over Jupyter notebooks, and I try to use docker development containers for reproducibility. For automated testing I use pytest and particularly the pytest plugin pytest-BDD. I have some coding experience in JavaScript, MATLAB, R, Java, and C.

Footnotes

  1. More on Forensic Metascience↩︎

  2. More on Forensic Scientometrics↩︎

  3. A survey of such practices↩︎

  4. Like these, for example↩︎

  5. Really any of the topics mentioned on the wikipedia article on Scientific Misconduct↩︎

  6. PEREIRA, V.; BASILIO, M.P.; SANTOS, C.H.T. (2025). PyBibX: A Python Library for Bibliometric and Scientometric Analysis Powered with Artificial Intelligence Tools. Data Technologies and Applications. Vol. 59, Iss. 2, pp. 302-337. doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/DTA-08-2023-0461↩︎