All that glitters is not gold

This blog post is not an accusation of misconduct, and reflects my personal opinion.

This paper has it all. The authors are from Stanford University’s School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School. It was published in 2002 in Nature Medicine, and has been cited over 900 times, as per Google Scholar. It even received a prestigious F1000 Recommendation. And it was supported by six NIH grants. 

Akbari O et al. Antigen-specific regulatory T cells develop via the ICOS–ICOS-ligand pathway and inhibit allergen-induced airway hyperreactivity. Nature Medicine 8(9), September 2002. DOI: 10.1038/nm745.
It glitters. But is it gold? Photo by Lucas Benjamin on Unsplash

But all that glitters is not gold. Let’s take a look at some of the flow cytometry images in this paper.

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Concerns about a top immunology lab

This post is not an accusation of misconduct.

Five years ago, in 2014, I reported three papers from the same lab with possible image duplications to the journals in which they had been published. One of these papers has since then been corrected – although I argued in a previous post about this paper that a retraction might have been a better decision. The other two papers are still untouched, unfortunately.

Since the journals and authors had had 5 years to respond, I posted my concerns about these three papers on PubPeer, so that at least researchers with the PubPeer extension can see that they have been “flagged”. I also found a couple more papers from this lab – headed by Dr. Xuetao Cao – that appeared to have problems and I posted these as well.

And then someone pointed out that the senior author on these papers was one of the top immunologists in China.

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John Maddox Prize 2019

Earlier this week, the John Maddox Prize was awarded in a lovely ceremony in the Wellcome Collection in London. The Maddox Prize “recognises the work of individuals who promote science and evidence, advancing the public discussion around difficult topics despite challenges or hostility.”

From the Sense About Science website: “The prize is a joint initiative of Sense about Science and the science journal Nature. The late Sir John Maddox, FRS, was editor of Nature for 22 years and a founding trustee of Sense about Science. His daughter Bronwen Maddox is the patron of the prize. The Maddox Prize is funded by the work of the organisations concerned and by public donations.”

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Annamalai University papers in the news

A quick post about some news articles that came out yesterday that report about the set of 200 papers from Annamalai University that I wrote about earlier here and here.

Scientific Misconduct exhibit at Bio26 Biennial of Design

Update: One of the photo collages on Burak’s exhibit was taken from Leonid Schneider’s website For Better Science, i.e. this post reporting on a misconduct investigation of papers by Karin Dahlman-Wright. The artist has acknowledged Leonid’s work at the exhibition.

This is really cool. Burak Korkmaz, who works in communication design and infographics, attended me to his exhibit at the Bio26 Biennial of Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Burak’s exhibit is called “Scientific Misconduct: Who cures cancer in photoshop?”

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Mega-corrections and weak editors

In the past months I have been going through my spreadsheet with over 2,000 papers with image or other problems. Many of these papers were reported by me in 2014 and 2015 to the editors of the journals in which they were published. Now, around 5 years later, it is time to see what happened with my reports.

In this post, I want to show you an example of a paper that I reported in 2014, and that was corrected about a year later.

In my opinion, the Editors of the journal made a huge mistake here. This should have been a retraction.

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Photoshop as a management modality

On Twitter, @DrVanDamme pointed me to a paper in published in July 2019 in the International Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, a journal of the International Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (IAOMS).

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