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”Tag: science
Discontinuous ridiculous stools – a preprint full of tortured phrases and stolen data
“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.
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Preprint claiming that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause transcriptomic dysregulation is deeply flawed
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 Preprints can be brilliant, misguided, or completely bonkers – but they have not been peer-reviewed.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Update, 12 September 2025: The preprint was withdrawn for “unresolved ethical issues concerning ethical oversight, legitimacy of institutional boards, validity of the study design, and potential biases in study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.“
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Science Integrity Digest Summer 2025
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.
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ScienceGuardians, where disgruntled authors complain about PubPeer
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.
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Science Integrity Digest – catching up
Apologies for not posting for a while. Fall 2024 was a busy time for me, with travel to give talks in Australia and Singapore and some events in the US. Instead of trying to catch up with everything that has happened since September, here are some highlights.
Einstein Foundation Award
I’m thrilled to have won the 2024 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. The Einstein Foundation Berlin selects three winners each year. The 2024 winners are:
- Early Career Award: Helena Jambor and Christopher Schmied at PixelQuality – Best practices for publishing images. ‘PixelQuality has established guidelines and checklists for publishing clear and reproducible images. It now aims to disseminate and refine them to handle AI-assisted image generation and analysis.’ ‘Research images are the proof of scientific findings, not just visuals. PixelQuality has set new standards for their reproducibility and transparency.’
- Institutional Award: PubPeer – ‘PubPeer has become an essential part of the research communication landscape, with over 300,000 comments logged so far. It is estimated that since 2012, 19 percent of all retractions of papers worldwide in all academic domains had a prior discussion on the site. Beyond identifying flaws and fraud, PubPeer functions as an important tool to jointly improve scientific publications through „liquid feedback“.’
- Individual Award: Elisabeth Bik – ‘Elisabeth Bik’s work in uncovering manipulated images, fraudulent research data and publications has created enormous impact all over the world. Her work has led to heightened awareness of questionable research practices and generated widespread attention to responsible conduct of research in the scientific community.’
The award ceremony will take place in March 2025 in Berlin, Germany.
The Bik Fund
Instead of accepting the Einstein Foundation award money for myself, I’ve decided to put it into ‘The Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund’ – where I hope to help other science sleuths with small grants for e.g., traveling to conferences, buying equipment or software, or training. Our type of work often does not fit into the hypothesis-driven model of government or charity funds, so I hope to help by filling this funding gap.
The Bik Fund will be part of The Center For Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch’s parent 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
It is my hope that we can make this fund grow, so we can help more integrity warriors in the future – donations to the Bik fund are tax-deductible and very welcome.
Press coverage:
- Announcing the Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund – Retraction Watch
- Renowned scientific integrity investigator endows fund to support fellow sleuths – Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik donates $200,000 to support training, travel – Jeffrey Brainard – Science
- There’s Fraud in Science – A New Fund Seeks To Tackle It – Molly Coddington – Technology Networks
Doctored
Charles Piller’s new book ‘Doctored – Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s’ came out earlier this month.
The book describes how Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University and a fellow image-sleuth, discovered possibly altered images in a highly-cited paper about amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients and in other papers connected to the biotech company Cassava Sciences (see also below). It also gives a disturbing insight into the amount of fraud in neuroscience and the lack of action by journals, institutions, and government agencies.
Matthew Schrag and other ‘science sleuths’—Kevin Patrick, Mu Yang, and I—worked for two years checking thousands of papers in Alzheimer’s research and related fields for the book, uncovering a concerning number of potential problems in papers by Sylvain Lesné, Berislav Zlokovic, Eliezer Masliah, and others.
Press coverage of Piller’s book:
- How Fraud, Greed and Negligence Have Stymied Alzheimer’s Research and Progress Toward a Cure – Alexis Madrigal – KQED
- The Science We Depend On: Behind Alzheimer’s Disease with Charles Piller – Ivan Oransky – MedCentral
- The Devastating Legacy of Lies in Alzheimer’s Science – Charles Piller – The New York Times
- Have doctors been wrong about how to treat Alzheimer’s disease? – The Economist
- Tariffs, Future of Cancer and Alzheimer’s, Global Debt Cycles | Wall Street Week – Bloomberg
Podcasts with Charles Piller and/or Matthew Schrag (there are many more!)
- Inquiring Minds: Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s with Charles Piller
- Science Friday: Investigating Fraud At The Heart Of Alzheimer’s Research
- Aging Well Episode 225 | Doctored: The Revealing Truth About Alzheimer’s Research | ft. Charles Piller
- The People’s Pharmacy – Show 1416: Exposing Fraud and Arrogance in Alzheimer’s Research
Cassava Sciences Phase 3 did not work
I have written in the past (here and here) about problematic images in papers by Dr. Hoau-Yan Wang and Cassava Sciences (NASDAQ: $SAVA), a biotech company testing a drug targeting Alzheimer’s disease. These concerns were first spotted by Matthew Schrag and published in a Citizen Petition, in an attempt to halt Cassava’s clinical trials. Despite the apparent problems, the FDA did not stop Cassava’s clinical trials of their Alzheimer’s drug, Simufilam. But Cassava’s stock dropped significantly, upsetting a lot of investors.
For three years, fans of the $SAVA stock harassed the Dr. Wang critics – including me – claiming that the drug would work fine; that all stockholders would be rich as long as they would HODL; and that all our concerns were FUD. They joined forces in a SAVAges Discord app, where they talked about how one day they would all buy Maseratis, Lamborghinis, and even a SAVA island — and how retarded and fraudulent the SAVA-critics were.
The authorities begged to differ, however. In March 2024, Science reported that FDA inspectors had found many problems in Dr. Wang’s lab, ranging from uncalibrated instruments, lack of control samples, and stored data files, to leaving out outliers based on subjective criteria. Another report by the City University of New York (CUNY) to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), leaked to Science, described ‘egregious misconduct’ in Dr. Wang’s lab. In June last year the Department of Justice announced that Professor Wang had been charged with operating a ‘Multimillion-Dollar Grant Fraud Scheme’.
Meanwhile, lawsuits were filed back-and-forth. Cassava Sciences was suing the people who filed the FDA citizen petition and who set up the website CassavaFraud.com, while stockholders were suing Cassava in a class-action lawsuit for misrepresenting the quality of the experiments performed by Dr. Wang. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Cassava with misrepresenting clinical trials result, and later settled for $40M. And CUNY, instead of officially announcing their misconduct findings, was investigating who leaked their misconduct investigation report to Science.
Finally, last December the biotech company announced that the Phase 3 trial did not meet the anticipated endpoints. In other words, Simufilam did not halt or improve Alzheimer’s disease. The Cassava Sciences stock immediately dropped to $2-3 dollars, and the SAVAges Discord became a valley of despair. No more SAVA island.
Didier Raoult enters the Retraction Watch Leaderboard
As I’ve written previously, many papers from Professor Didier Raoult, the former director of the IHU Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, France, are problematic.
Some appear to contain manipulated images, while others describe research conducted without proper ethical permits. A number of Raoult’s studies were performed on vulnerable populations, such as homeless people, or on study participants in the Global South, which I [gasp!] dared to label neocolonial science.
As described in this paper by Fabrice Frank et al, the IHU-MI produced a set of 248 studies all with the same IRB approval number, 09–022. Despite sharing the same permit, the publications varied in terms of sample type, demographics, and countries. Other ‘multi-use’ IRB numbers were found too. Typically, an IRB approves one particular study, and researchers are not allowed to reuse this permit for other, unrelated, studies. Dr. Raoult appears to have cared little for such rules, however.
After raising our concerns on PubPeer and social media, and also writing to journal editors, several journals have started to issue Expressions of Concern and retractions.
Fabrice Frank has generated a list of all IHU-MI papers with concerns – there are over 800!
In fact, Raoult has now earned so many retractions (32 as of today) that he has entered the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. The most significant of them is the retraction of the paper that claimed that Hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. I criticized this paper in my blog post in April 2020, days after its publication. It took more than four years to get it retracted.
With over 600 of his papers on PubPeer and 225 EoCs, it seems safe to assume that for Raoult’s position on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard list, the only way is up.
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Science Integrity Digest, September 2024
An overview of general news and articles about science integrity and some cases that I have worked on.
Science sleuths
- The Rise of the Science Sleuths – When an Alzheimer’s paper came under scrutiny, correcting the scientific record meant battling much bigger problems – Jessica Wapner – Undark
- Sleuths unearthing malpractice should receive gratitude, not hostility. The British Museum learned it was wrong to brush off a whistleblower. Universities and journals should do the same, says David Sanders – David Sanders – Times Higher Education
Neuroscientist and top NIH official under scrutiny
- Picture Imperfect – Scores of papers by Eliezer Masliah, prominent neuroscientist and top NIH official, fall under suspicion – Charles Piller – Science
- Statement by NIH on Research Misconduct Findings – National Institutes of Health
- Fraud, So Much Fraud – Derek Lowe – Science
- Leading Neuroscientist Accused of Research Misconduct – Jessica Blake – Inside Higher Ed
- A top government scientist engaged in research misconduct, NIH finds – Associated Press
- Prominent NIH Neuroscientist Fired Over Alleged Research Misconduct – Megan Brooks – Medscape
Q-Collar under scrutiny
- This Device Is ‘Proven’ to Protect Athletes’ Brains. The Science Is Under Fire. – Stephanie M Lee – The Chronicle of Higher Education
- [from December 2022:] Will This Device Protect Athletes’ Brains, or Only Make Them Think It Does? – Matthew Futterman – New York Times [free-access link]
Nobel prize winner under scrutiny
- Nobel prize-winner tallies two more retractions, bringing total to 13 – Ellie Kincaid – Retraction Watch
Paper Mills
- Widespread signs of paper milling discovered in materials science and engineering papers – Julia Robinson – Chemistry World
New ORI regulations
The US Office of Research Integrity updated its regulations on handling research misconduct allegations. Key updates include clarifying the inquiry process and adjusting how institutions should handle the allegations and record the process.
- Final U.S. misconduct rule drops controversial changes. Biomedical oversight agency replaces proposal to publicize institutional findings with smaller steps toward greater transparency – Jeffrey Mervis – Science
- Colleges Get More Leeway to Handle Research Misconduct – Christa Dutton – The Chronicle of Higher Education
- ORI Issues Final Changes to Research Misconduct Regulations: Key Reforms and Lingering Complexities – Ropes and Gray Law Offices
- Research misconduct claims are growing. Will new rules help universities investigate? Scientific sleuths say the updated rules aren’t enough to make a dent in research integrity violations – Anil Oza – STAT In the Lab
- New HHS rules can’t address the primary reason for research misconduct. Publish or perish must perish – Paul Martin Jensen – STAT Opinion
1 in 7 scientific articles might be fake
James Heathers published a preprint arguing that the old, often-cited number that 2% of papers are fake is outdated and a vast underestimate. In a new preprint, he argues it might be 1 in 7 papers, based on 12 studies that together analyze 75,000 scientific articles.
- How Much Science Is Fake? – James Heathers – OSF
- 1 in 7 scientific papers is fake, suggests study that author calls ‘wildly nonsystematic’ – Dalmeet Singh Chawla – Retraction Watch
Francesca Gino lawsuit
- How a Scientific Dispute Spiralled Into a Defamation Lawsuit – What does a Harvard Business School professor’s decision to sue the professors who raised questions about her research bode for academic autonomy? By Gideon Lewis-Kraus – New Yorker
- She Sued the Sleuths Who Found Fraud in Her Data. A Judge Just Ruled Against Her. – Stephanie M. Lee – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Around the world
- India’s research crime is getting worse. Scientists are gaming peer review system. International watchdogs are flagging India as a top producer of ‘low-quality and fraudulent’ research. Last year, India ranked behind only China and the US – Soumya Pillai – The Print
- Transparency and Integrity Risks in China’s Research Ecosystem: A Primer and Call To Action – Jeffrey Stoff, Leslie McIntosh, An Chi Lee
- New academic AI guidelines aim to curb research misconduct. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the country’s top science institute, on Tuesday published new guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in scientific research, as part of its efforts to improve scientific integrity and reduce research misconduct, such as data fabrication and plagiarism. – Zhang Weilan – Global Times
New Publication and Editorials
- Quantifying Data Distortion in Bar Graphs in Biological Research. We developed a framework to quantify data distortion and analyzed bar graphs published across 3387 articles in 15 journals, finding consistent data distortions across journals and common biological data types. – Lin and Landry – bioRxiv
- Five problems plaguing publishing in the life sciences—and one common cause – Duncan E. Wright – FEBS Letters
- Fake Degrees and Fraudulent Credentials in Higher Education – Sarah Elaine Eaton, Jamie J. Carmichael, Helen Pethrick, eds., Minerva
- GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation – Haider et al. – Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review
- Retracted articles in scientific literature: A bibliometric analysis from 2003 to 2022 using the Web of Science – Koo and Lin – Heliyon
- Legal and Operational Aspects of Compliance with Scientific Integrity – Weber-Mandrin et al. Chimia
- Tracing the Retraction Cascade: Identifying Non-retracted but Potentially Retractable Articles – Usman and Balke – Linking Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries
Retraction Watch’s Weekend Reads:
- September 7: Weekend reads: A plethora of misdeeds; big slowdown at several publishers; hydroxychloroquine paper retraction draws scrutiny
- September 14: Weekend reads: Lawsuits filed and dismissed; ‘the rise of the science sleuths;’ research assessment culture
- September 21: Weekend reads: Harm reduction for peer review; finding reviewers; fake journals
- September 28: Weekend reads: Top NIH neuroscientist out amid suspicion; the issue with special issues; an ingredient derailed experiments
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Science Integrity Digest, August 2024
Your monthly digest of science integrity news.
General Science Integrity News
- The staggering death toll of scientific lies. Scientific fraud kills people. Should it be illegal? – Kelsey Piper – Vox
- What’s in a picture? Two decades of image manipulation awareness and action – Mike Rossner – Retraction Watch
- He was a rising star of academia with multiple papers. He was also a cat
- Researcher creates fake profile for pet to expose flaws in Google Scholar website that allow scientists to fraudulently boost their credibility – Rhys Blakely – The Times
- The Academic Culture of Fraud. The trustees maintain that the fraud arose from “lab culture and management,” and therefore implicitly that there is no single individual who bears moral or procedural responsibility for actually falsifying the data. – Ben Landau-Taylor – Palladium
- Retracted Alzheimer’s Paper Reshapes Research Landscape, but Progress Continues – Science Blog
- Optimizing research integrity investigations: the need for evidence – Dorothy Bishop – The Bishop Blog
Sleuthing
- Journal of Molecular Liquids vs One-Man Papermills – Mu Yang catches two crooks, Ayman Atta and S Muthu, who flooded one Elsevier journal (and several others) with ridiculous hand-drawn fraud. Whom to believe, the peer review, or your own eyes? – Leonid Schneider – For Better Science
- With Random Precision. Papermills continue to appear on the scene (or rather, they have been there all along, waiting to be noticed) and once again we find ourselves with shovels and brooms, cleaning up after the performing elephants. – Smut Clyde – For Better Science
- Scientific whistleblowers can be compensated for their service. To help correct the incentives, Ben Laundau-Taylor suggests that science could borrow an idea from the US financial system, where an SEC bounty program pays whistleblowers 10-30% of the fines imposed by the government. – Chris Said
- The citation black market: schemes selling fake references alarm scientists – The ways in which researchers can artificially inflate their reference counts are growing – Dalmeet Singh Chawla – Nature News
- Oxford Brookes professor awarded for academic integrity work – Professor Mary Davis has been given a National Teaching Fellowship, which celebrates individuals who have made an outstanding impact on student outcomes and teaching in higher education. – OxfordMail
- Mandyam Srinivasan of bee studies fame faces misconduct allegations. Based on his work on bees, Srinivasan received an award from IISc in 2009 among other honours, but two biologists have now called 10 of his papers into question – T V Padma – The Hindu
Legal threats for science critics
- Exclusive: Kavli prize winner threatens to sue critic for defamation. One of the winners of the 2024 Kavli Prize in nanoscience has threatened to sue a longtime critic, Retraction Watch has learned. – Ellie Kincaid – Retraction Watch
- Award-winning chemist threatens to sue critic – Dalmeet Singh Chawla – Chemistry World
- PNAS corrects article by Kavli prize winner who threatened to sue critic – Retraction Watch
- Whistleblowing in science: this physician faced ostracization after standing up to pharma – Physician scientist Nancy Olivieri describes hard-won lessons from decades of fighting for scientific integrity – Nature News
Federal and institutional investigations
- Former Maryland dept. chair with $19 million in grants faked data in 13 papers, feds say. A former department chair engaged in research misconduct in work funded by 19 grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity. – Ellie Kincaid – Retraction Watch
- Senior biochemist made up data in 13 studies – US Office of Research Integrity report aligns with investigation by the University of Maryland, Baltimore -Dalmeet Singh Chawla, special to C&EN
- Case Summary: Eckert, Richard L – Office of Research Integrity
- Faked heart papers retracted following Ohio State investigation – Dawn Attride – Retraction Watch
- NOAA agrees to restore ‘scientific integrity’ in its influential $1 billion climate disaster tally – In response to the study by Roger Pielke Jr., NOAA said it will take steps to address the flaws in its methodology in its “billion dollar disaster” tally, used as a touchstone by media and policymakers. – Kevin Killough – Just The News
- Data integrity is ‘biggest issue’ for drug, API firms during inspections, FDA official says – Jeff Craven – Regulatory Focus
Publishers taking action
- Exclusive: Publisher retracts more than 450 papers from journal it acquired last year. Sage has retracted 467 articles from the Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems, a title it took on when it acquired IOS Press last November for an undisclosed sum. – Retraction Watch
- Sleuths spur cleanup at journal with nearly 140 retractions and counting. The mass retractions began over a year after sleuths Alexander Magazinov and Guillaume Cabanac first raised concerns about the presence of suspicious citations, tortured phrases and undisclosed use of AI in the journal’s articles. – Avery Orrall – Retraction Watch
- Three MDMA therapy papers retracted over ethics violations – Meghana Keshavan – STAT News
Games
- The Publish or Perish Game – A Game Where We Embrace Plagiarism and The Reviewer 2 In Us
- UOW Age of Integrity – Game-based learning on Academic Integrity – European Network for Academic Integrity / University of Wollongong
Artificial intelligence and science
- Flood of ‘junk’: How AI is changing scientific publishing. Several experts who track down problems in studies told AFP that the rise of AI has turbocharged the existing problems in the multi-billion-dollar sector. – Daniel Lawler – AFP/Yahoo News
- AI scientists have a problem: AI bots are reviewing their work – ChatGPT is wreaking chaos in the field that birthed it – Stephanie M Lee – The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Has your paper been used to train an AI model? Almost certainly. Artificial-intelligence developers are buying access to valuable data sets that contain research papers — raising uncomfortable questions about copyright – Elizabeth Gibney – Nature
- Is ChatGPT a Reliable Ghostwriter? Irène Buvat and Wolfgang A. Weber – The Journal of Nuclear Medicine
- Is AI my co-author? The ethics of using artificial intelligence in scientific publishing – Barton Moffatt and Alicia Hall – Accountability in Research
- A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem – Karin Verspoor – The Conversation
- Three ways to promote critical engagement with GenAI – However much we fear its impact or despise its outputs, when teaching humanities, the best response is to encourage students to engage with it critically – Neville Morley – Times Higher Education
- Colloquium explores ethical dilemmas arising from the use of AI and Big Data in research – University of the Witwatersrand
- Statement on Harnessing Science and Technology to Address the Challenges of Today and Open Doors to the Future – Chief Science Advisors representing Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States – The Whitehouse
New Publication and Editorials
- Prevalence of plagiarism in hijacked journals: A text similarity analysis. These findings suggest a tendency for fraudulent journals to attract authors who do not uphold scientific integrity principles. – Anna Abalkina – Accountability in Research
- The PubPeer conundrum: Administrative challenges in research misconduct proceedings – Minal M Caron et al. – Accountability in Research
- Anxiety in Academia: The Impact of Predatory Journals on Researchers and Scientific Integrity [published in a predatory journal?] – Chad G Pettee and Briac Halbou – Journal of Biomedical Research & Environmental Sciences
- Should We Publish Fewer Papers? By this proposition, I am not advocating that we all “slack off”, but rather that we work harder to make sure we publish fewer but higher quality papers with new and significant scientific insights instead of reporting routine or incremental studies in large numbers of papers.- Song Jin – ACS Energy Letters
- Preserving Academic Integrity: Combating the Proliferation of Paper Mills in Scholarly Publishing – Poonam Singh Deo and P. Hangsing – Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries
- It Takes a Village! Editorship, Advocacy, and Research in Running an Open Access Data Journal – Mandy Wigdorowitz et al. – Publications
Retraction Watch’s Weekend Reads:
- August 3: Weekend reads: Happy birthday, Retraction Watch!; a mysterious conference; extreme publishing; research parasites revisited
- August 10: Weekend reads: Publish or perish, the card game; revisiting fraud in anesthesiology; the Hindawi mass retraction timeline
- August 17: Weekend reads: MDMA papers retracted; COVID-19 vaccine paper retracted for the second time; who gets cited more?
- August 24: Weekend reads: Why scientist rankings should be ignored; misconduct claims in court; mining company demands retraction
- August 31: Weekend reads: When retracted work is cited; another retraction for a Nobelist; should scientific fraud be illegal?
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Science Integrity Digest, June 2024
A round-up from last month, with news articles about science integrity, retractions of several highly cited papers in the fields of Alzheimer’s disease and stem cell research, generative AI and misconduct, and another retraction for Didier Raoult.
General Science Integrity News
- An epidemic of scientific fakery threatens to overwhelm publishers. More than 10,000 scientific papers were retracted last year as “paper mills” exploit the system. Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky – Washington Post
- How restorative justice could help to heal science communities torn apart by harassment misconduct– Could a programme used by police to tackle repeat offending be used in academia? Some institutions are keen to find out. – Sarah Wild – Nature Career Feature
- The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct – Since universities and journals have failed to regulate themselves, we should strengthen our external layers of oversight. Below are two complementary ideas – Chris Said
- Pressure From the Top – Chinese institutions and authorities are indeed becoming worried about the increasing flood of low- (or zero-) quality papers that come from all sorts of Chinese sources. – Derek Lowe – In the Pipeline – Science
- 62% of Indians demand mandatory research integrity training for early-career researchers – A survey indicated the need to have broad support for mandatory in-person research integrity training across researcher demographics – Education Times
Highly cited Alzheimer’s paper retracted by Nature
- Daily briefing: Landmark Alzheimer’s paper will be retracted. Senior author plans to retract her team’s highly cited study on the cause of Alzheimer’s disease after acknowledging that the paper contains manipulated images. Plus, why cicadas shriek so loudly and how CO2 helps viruses stay alive in the air. – Flora Graham – Nature Briefing
- Alzheimer’s study pulled over data tampering. American university researchers insist their main findings still stand in dementia paper that had been cited 2,500 times. It is the most-cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch, a group that flags dubious research and regularly finds signs of evidence tampering. – Rhys Blakely – The Times UK
- After Amyloid. Authors of a landmark Alzheimer’s disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper’s senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. – Mike Barr – POZ
- Do we have Alzheimer’s disease all wrong?
Retracted studies and new treatments reveal the confusing state of Alzheimer’s research. The authors of the retracted paper in question, which was published in Nature in 2006 and claimed to identify a specific target for future drug development, agreed to withdraw their research in full, two years after a stunning investigation by Science found that key images had been doctored.
Dylan Scott – Vox - Alzheimer : les dessous de la fraude scientifique derrière l’une des études les plus influentes. Il y a deux ans, un chercheur jusqu’ici inconnu formulait des accusations de fraude contre l’un des articles scientifiques les plus importants au monde. Il vient d’obtenir gain de cause. Antoine Beau – L’Express [In French]
- Retraction, 26 June 2024: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07691-8
Even higher cited stem cell paper retracted by Nature
About 17 years after New Scientist investigators Eugenie Reich and Peter Aldhous revealed problems in a Nature 2002 paper about making adult stem cells pluripotent (see 2007 articles in New Scientist and New York Times and this recent X thread here), and more than four years after I found additional problems in that paper (PubPeer), Nature decided to retract it. Meanwhile, it has been cited nearly 4,500 times.
- Nature retracts highly cited 2002 paper that claimed adult stem cells could become any type of cell. Nature has retracted a 2002 paper from the lab of Catherine Verfaillie purporting to show a type of adult stem cell could, under certain circumstances, “contribute to most, if not all, somatic cell types.”
The retracted article, “Pluripotency of mesenchymal stem cells derived from adult marrow,” has been controversial since its publication. Still, it has been cited nearly 4,500 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science – making it by far the most-cited retracted paper ever. – Ellie Kincaid – Retraction Watch - ‘Dit is heel pijnlijk’: veelbesproken stamcelstudie van Catherine Verfaillie herroepen door vakblad ‘Nature’. Het is de finale klap voor het artikel, waar sommigen al langer vragen bij stelden. Als reden verwijst Nature naar onregelmatigheden in twee afbeeldingen die de Nederlandse Elisabeth Bik, een microbiologe gespecialiseerd in de materie, 4,5 jaar geleden had gesignaleerd.
– Barbara Debusschere – De Morgen [In Dutch] - Intrekken van paper over “baanbrekend ” stamcelonderzoek komt niet helemaal onverwacht voor Catherine Verfaillie – Maxie Eckert – Nieuwsblad [In Dutch]
- Waarom wordt baanbrekend onderzoek van professor Catherine Verfaillie na 22 jaar van tafel geveegd? “Het is een smet op mijn blazoen” – Koen Baumers – Nieuwsblad
- Copy-pasten met Photoshop: ook vakblad Nature trekt paper met “baanbrekend” stamcelonderzoek van Catherine Verfaillie terug – Maxie Eckert – De Standaard
- Paper by researcher Catherine Verfaillie (67) withdrawn by the journal Nature – Leuven Actueel
Other notable misconduct findings
- Faked results lead to retraction of high-profile cancer neuroscience study. An investigation found that the experiments required more animals than the scientists had purchased. Dalmeet Singh Chawla – The Transmitter
- Star botanist likely made up data about nutritional supplements, new probe finds – After 2022 exoneration, fresh inquiry concludes Steven Newmaster fabricated data that questioned quality of echinacea, ginkgo, and other substances – Charles Piller – Science
- Findings of research misconduct have been made against Shaker Mousa, Ph.D., M.B.A., FACC, FACB (Respondent), who was a Professor, Chairman, and Executive Vice President of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute, Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (ACPHS) – Federal Register
Another retraction for Didier Raoult
The International Journal of Obesity retracted an article on which Didier Raoult was the corresponding and last author, “because the authors could not confirm approval from an appropriate ethics committee to recruit healthy donors to provide samples for use in this research.”According to the Retraction Watch Database, this is his 13th retraction. The paper had been flagged on PubPeer because it was one of five papers with the same local approval number, while it appeared to not have CPP approval (regional IRB-like approval needed in France for human subjects research). Read more about the problems in Raoult’s papers here, here, and here.
Artificial intelligence and science misconduct
A (now-retracted) paper featuring an AI-generated rat with a giant penis has caused a lot of laughs on social media. But AI is capable of making much more believable images. Is the scientific publishing world ready for a tsunami of fake photos and dataset? And how can we use AI tools to actually detect fraud? Also see below in the new publication list.
- Smelling a rat with AI – Judith Hochstrasser – Horizons Switzerland
- Dieses Bild ist gefälscht – Moritz Marthaler – Tagesanzeiger (in German)
- AI vs. AI: How to detect image manipulation and avoid academic misconduct – Deepesh Bodekar – Enago Academy
- Academics despair as ChatGPT-written essays swamp marking season
‘It’s not a machine for cheating; it’s a machine for producing crap,’ says one professor infuriated by rise of bland scripts – Jack Grove – Times Higher Education - Online course provider launches AI plagiarism detection tool – Breccan F. Thies – Gazette
- Springer Nature unveils two new AI tools to protect research integrity – Geppetto and SnappShot playing important role in stopping fake research from being published – Springer Nature press release
- Universities regulate use of AI in writing – More than 80 percent of college students have used AI tools to assist their assignments, according to a survey conducted by China Youth Daily in November. – Zhao Yimeng – China Daily
Science Integrity around the world
- Elite researchers in China say they had ‘no choice’ but to commit misconduct – Smriti Mallapathy – Nature News
- Barriers to Investigating and Reporting Research Misconduct. Between January 2023 and March 2024, the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) convened a working group to explore what barriers there may be to investigating and reporting research misconduct.
- China ramps up fight against online lies and misconduct – Cao Yin – China Daily
Interviews with science sleuths
- Ils traquent les études bancales ou frauduleuses : la croisade des chevaliers blancs de la science. Chiffres tronqués, copier-coller grossiers, textes absurdes écrits par l’intelligence artificielle : des chercheurs traquent dans les études scientifiques les pratiques douteuses de leurs confrères. L’infectiologue Didier Raoult fait régulièrement les frais de leur intransigeance. – Gaël Lombart – Le Parisien
- Frode Scientifica: Una intervista ad Elisabeth Bik – Open Science @UNIMI
New publications and editorials
- Proposed Increases in Government Authority Over Research Misconduct Proceedings – Caron et al., JAMA
- The Impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Scientific Content Synthesis for Authors – Chhavi Chauhan – American Journal of Pathology
- The Impact of AI on Academic Research and Publishing – Brady Lund et al., arXiv
- Codes of conduct should help scientists navigate societal expectations – Ambrosi et al. – Humanities & Social Sciences Communications
- Editorial: Adapting to AI – Artificial intelligence tools have the potential to revolutionize how scientists work and publish. We share our ground rules for managing the inherent risks. – Nature Geoscience
Retraction Watch’s Weekend Reads:
- June 1: Weekend reads: Another vaccine-autism retraction; ‘Why We Commit Academic Fraud’; on a psilocybin-depression correction
- June 8: Weekend reads: Major Alzheimer’s paper slated for retraction; research dog breeder pleads guilty; biomedical retractions quadruple
- June 16: Weekend reads: ‘An epidemic of scientific fakery’; death threats for critics; Cleveland Clinic settles mismanagement allegations for $7.6 million
- June 22: Weekend reads: A researcher explains how he publishes every three days; scientific bounty hunters; criminalizing scientific misconduct
- June 29: Weekend reads: Huge cash bonuses for publishing in Nature; Alzheimer’s researcher charged with fraud; fines for buying authorship
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Science Integrity Digest, May 2024
A digest of last month’s news articles, retractions, and scientific publications about science integrity and misconduct. Some articles might be behind a paywall. Let me know in the comments if I missed something!
Continue reading “Science Integrity Digest, May 2024”
Science Integrity Digest 