A blog about science integrity, by Elisabeth Bik, for Harbers-Bik LLC
In 2016, with coauthors Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, I published a study on 20,000 biomedical papers with photographic images, in which we found an average of 4% to contain inappropriately duplicated images.
Not surprisingly, we found that percentage to vary per journal. Some of the 40 journals we investigated had much higher percentages of image duplicates than others.
Continue reading “A study on Oncotarget papers”(Based on two Twitter threads from yesterday).
All too often, blots that appear to have duplicated lanes or cells (suggestive of photo manipulation) are corrected by the author with an “Oops, here is a new figure”.
Bewilderingly, journals find this acceptable. This has to change.
In the past week, I looked at papers from the group of Catherine Verfaillie, who previously worked at the University of Minnesota (USA) and later became the director of the Stem Cell Institute at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven; Belgium). The outcome of this renewed look at a “cold case” was first described by Leonid Schneider in a December 4 post on his For Better Science blog.
Continue reading “Concern about stem cell research from KU Leuven and the University of Minnesota”
