Tag: animal models

Problems in Harvard Medical School studies include images taken from other researchers’ papers and vendor websites

Over the last week I’ve been analyzing a set of papers from a research group at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which falls under the Harvard Medical School. The papers have the usual image problems we unfortunately encounter so often, such as duplicated photos of mice and overlapping Western blots.

But this set also includes a 2022 paper that appears to have copied/pasted several figure panels from other researchers and even from scientific vendors. Most of these problems were found with ImageTwin or reverse image searches.

Quick links [the spreadsheet and slide have been updated with an additional problem found on Feb 2, 2024]:

  • spreadsheet with the 28 29 papers found with PubPeer links [Excel file]
  • slide deck with the 58 59 image problems found in the 28 29 papers [PDF].
An image that appears to have been copied from a scientific seller’s website.
See: https://pubpeer.com/publications/FF5706E8826CB8D45481E942A679EE
Continue reading “Problems in Harvard Medical School studies include images taken from other researchers’ papers and vendor websites”

Gasping for air: 18 papers from Sichuan University and UCSF

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

Happy New Year! I started 2020 by scanning a set of papers from researchers at the Department of Pediatrics, West China Second University Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, with a connection to the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF). These researchers use a pretty cruel baby rat model to investigate the effect of oxygen deprivation on the developing brain. I found that one out of five papers from this group appears to have image problems.

Continue reading “Gasping for air: 18 papers from Sichuan University and UCSF”