A blog about science integrity, by Elisabeth Bik, for Harbers-Bik LLC. Support my work at Patreon.com/elisabethbik
Early May, I attended the 2026 World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. This conference is held every two years. In 2024, I went to the WCRI in Athens, Greece, and in 2022 to the one in Cape Town, South Africa. In this post, I will provide a short summary and links to my BlueSky #WCRI2026 posts for all the sessions I attended.
On some days, after hours of image scanning, I feel like doing something different. Today, I searched for some scientific papers containing “tortured phrases”. This term was first coined by Guillaume Cabanac et al. in a 2021 preprint.
Tortured phrases are bizarrely synonymized versions of standard scientific terms produced when authors run copied text through paraphrasing or translation software to disguise plagiarism. This can lead to funny sounding word combinations, such as “bosom malignancy” instead of “breast cancer“.
Today, I found a beautiful example of synonymized plagiarism involving the microbiome of a camel’s udder.
Over the past couple of days, I have been reviewing a series of Materials Science papers, all co-authored by the same group of researchers from the Universities of Lahore, Chakwal, and Sargodha in Pakistan. While reviewing them, one analytical technique kept standing out for unusual reasons.
Continue reading “UnEDXpected Peaks”Good morning from Chicago! We will start Day 3 (last day) of the 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. @peerreviewcongress.bsky.social / peerreviewcongress.org/peer-review-… #PRC10 <— This hashtag will give you all the posts! You can also click on this feed, created by @retropz.bsky.social: bsky.app/profile/did:…
Continue reading “Peer Review Congress Chicago – Day 3”Good morning from Chicago, where we are getting ready for Day 2 of the 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication. peerreviewcongress.org / @peerreviewcongress.bsky.social / #PRC10
It’s Peer Review Week! A perfect time to post my notes from the 10th International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, which was held at the Swissôtel in Chicago, two weeks ago, September 3-5, 2025.
This was my first time attending this congress. I tried to live-post all the talks on BlueSky [except for one session where I sneaked out].
You can find most posts about this conference under the hashtag #PRC10 on BlueSky or X. Andrew Porter @retropz.bsky.social, Research Integrity and Training Adviser at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, created a BlueSky feed as well.
This post will contain (lightly edited) notes from Day 1. Click here to see the posts from [Day 2] and [Day 3].
Continue reading “Peer Review Congress Chicago – Day 1”“Patients with provocative entrail illness unclassified gave to crisis division a 3-day history of sickness, retching, migraine and irregular stomach torment alongside discontinuous ridiculous stools as of late.”
If you cannot wrap your brain around this sentence, don’t worry. Neither can I.
Today, 25 July 2025, a preprint was posted claiming that significant gene expression changes were found in individuals with new-onset cancer and other diseases after receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, compared to healthy individuals.
A preprint is a non-peer reviewed manuscript – a study or hypothesis that has not yet been evaluated by other scientists. These articles should always be read with caution. Preprints can be brilliant, misguided, or completely bonkers – but they have not been peer-reviewed.
So let’s take a closer look at this preprint.
Update, 12 September 2025: The preprint was withdrawn for “unresolved ethical issues concerning ethical oversight, legitimacy of institutional boards, validity of the study design, and potential biases in study interpretation that compromise the overall trust in the research findings.“
Continue reading “Preprint claiming that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause transcriptomic dysregulation is deeply flawed”It is hard to find the time to post here. I’m getting lots of requests to help scanning papers for image problems, and am also traveling a lot to give talks and be in panels. So my ‘monthly’ digests have now turned into quarterly digests, hahaha.
These past months, I have traveled to Berlin to receive the Einstein Foundation Award, to Oxford for the FAIRS Meeting, participated in a workshop in Stockholm organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences about the Reformation of Science Publishing, a conference in London at the Royal Society about the Future of Science Publishing, and a gathering with other science detectives and journalists in Krakow, Poland. In between, I gave several talks at research institutions and medical schools. I am getting pretty good at packing suitcases!
Here is a round-up of some noteworthy articles about research integrity.
Continue reading “Science Integrity Digest Summer 2025”On Twitter/X, @SciGuardians, associated with the website ScienceGuardians.com, is promising to ‘uncover’ some big conspiracy of fraudulent @pubpeer.com users.
But in reality, the account appears to be run by one or more disgruntled scientists with dozens of problematic papers. And there is no big reveal.
Science Integrity Digest 