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.
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]:
In a report shared with Science in October 2023, a committee investigating allegations of misconduct by Dr. Hoau-Yan Wang, a professor at the City College of New York (CCNY, which falls under the City University of New York (CUNY)), found evidence that was ‘highly suggestive of deliberate scientific misconduct’. Dr. Wang has been a frequent collaborator with Cassava Sciences (Nasdaq: SAVA), a biotech company working on a drug called simufilam for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Unfortunately, Dr. Wang was unable to provide the committee with any original data or notebooks that could have addressed concerns about his work. Although the suspicions of manipulated images could therefore not be proved, the investigation revealed “long-standing and egregious misconduct in data management and record keeping by Dr. Wang”.
This post describes a set of over 20 papers with mostly image problems from the Department of Pharmacology at the School of Medicine of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. All papers have Professor Ximei Wu as the common – and often corresponding – author. The Wu lab conducts research on stem cell and bone development, and their papers contain many images of Western blots and immunohistochemistry experiments.
Continue reading “Problematic Papers from Zhejiang University”This blog post expresses my personal opinion. It is not an accusation of misconduct.
In my last post, I wrote about a large set of around 200 problematic papers, all from research groups at Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu, India.
There are two additional problem sets.
Continue reading “More troubles at Annamalai University”This blog post expresses my personal opinion. It is not an accusation of misconduct.
Update October 2020: The list of Annamalai University papers with concerns has grown to 229. Here is the list, with links to the PubPeer posts, as an Excel file and as a PDF.
Annamalai (often spelled “Annaamalai”) is the name of an Indian hit-movie from 1992. It is also the name of a state university in Tamil Nadu, a state in the South of India.
Annamalai University was founded in 1929 (celebrating its 90th Anniversary this year) by Rajah Sir S. R. M. Annamalai Chettiar, and is ranked in 801-1000 in the world by The Times Higher Education.
Continue reading “Concerns about papers from Annamalai University”
Science Integrity Digest 