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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective – The New Yorker (Ingfei Chen | June 2021)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on September 1, 2021
Keywords: Institutional responsibilities, International, Research Misconduct, Research results, Researcher responsibilities

The Linked Original Item was Posted On June 23, 2021

The word "INVESTIGATIONS" seen through a curled rip of brown paperb

Using just her eyes and memory, Elisabeth Bik has single-handedly identified thousands of studies containing potentially doctored scientific images.

In June of 2013, Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist, grew curious about the subject of plagiarism. She had read that scientific dishonesty was a growing problem, and she idly wondered if her work might have been stolen by others. One day, she pasted a sentence from one of her scientific papers into the Google Scholar search engine. She found that several of her sentences had been copied, without permission, in an obscure online book. She pasted a few more sentences from the same book chapter into the search box, and discovered that some of them had been purloined from other scientists’ writings.

If one research integrity sleuth deserved plaudits for their contribution to global science, it would be Elisabeth Bik.  Her work has been simply extraordinary and she deserves the highest praise.

Bik has a methodical, thorough disposition, and she analyzed the chapter over the weekend. She found that it contained text plagiarized from eighteen uncredited sources, which she categorized using color-coded highlighting. Searching out plagiarism became a kind of hobby for Bik; she began trawling Google Scholar for more cases in her off-hours, when she wasn’t working as a researcher at Stanford. She soon identified thirty faked biomedical papers, some in well-respected journals. She e-mailed the publications’ editors, and, within a few months, some of the articles were retracted.

In January, 2014, Bik was scrolling through a suspicious dissertation when she began glancing at the images, too. They included photographs known as Western blots, in which proteins appear as dark bands. Bik thought that she’d seen one particular protein band before—it had a fat little black dot at one end. Elsewhere in the dissertation, she found the same band flipped around and presented as if it were data from a different experiment. She kept looking, and spotted a dozen more Western blots that looked copied or subtly doctored. She learned that the thesis, written by a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, had been published as two journal articles in 2010.

How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective
Using just her eyes and memory, Elisabeth Bik has single-handedly identified thousands of studies containing potentially doctored scientific images.

Related Reading

How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective – The New Yorker (Ingfei Chen | June 2021)

Research Integrity ‘Whistleblower’: Don’t Ignore Outsiders, Train Senior Investigators – HCCA (Theresa Defino | June 2021)

(France) Scientific image sleuth faces legal action for criticizing research papers – Nature (Holly Else | May 2021)

Conflict of Skinterest – Science Integrity Digest (Elisabeth Bik | October 2020)

The Science Sleuth Holding Fraudulent Research Accountable – leapsmag (Kira Peikoff | August 2020)

Oops!… I Did It Again. When to correct or retract? – Science Integrity Digest (Elisabeth Bik | January 2020)

The Fraud Finder: A conversation with Elisabeth Bik – The Last Word on Nothing (Sally Adee | February 2019)

One in 25 papers contains inappropriately duplicated images, screen finds – Retraction Watch (Cat Ferguson April 2016)

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