Fakery spans “beautified” data, photoshopped images, and “paper mills.” Experts and institutions are employing tools to spot deceptive research and mitigate
its reach.

LIKE MUCH OF the internet, PubPeer is the sort of place where you might want to be anonymous. There, under randomly assigned taxonomic names like Actinopolyspora biskrensis (a bacterium) and Hoya camphorifolia (a flowering plant), “sleuths” meticulously document mistakes in the scientific literature. Though they write about all sorts of errors, from bungled statistics to nonsensical methodology, their collective expertise is in manipulated images: clouds of protein that show suspiciously crisp edges, or identical arrangements of cells in two supposedly distinct experiments. Sometimes, these irregularities mean nothing more than that a researcher tried to beautify a figure before submitting it to a journal. But they nevertheless raise red flags.

PubPeer’s rarefied community of scientific detectives has produced an unlikely celebrity: Elisabeth Bik, who uses her uncanny acuity to spot image duplications that would be invisible to practically any other observer. Such duplications can allow scientists to conjure results out of thin air by Frankensteining parts of many images together or to claim that one image represents two separate experiments that produced similar results. But even Bik’s preternatural eye has limitations: It’s possible to fake experiments without actually using the same image twice. “If there’s a little overlap between the two photos, I can nail you,” she says. “But if you move the sample a little farther, there’s no overlap for me to find.” When the world’s most visible expert can’t always identify fraud, combating it—or even studying it—might seem an impossibility.

Nevertheless, good scientific practices can effectively reduce the impact of fraud—that is, outright fakery—on science, whether or not it is ever discovered. Fraud “cannot be excluded from science, just like we cannot exclude murder in our society,” says Marcel van Assen, a principal investigator in the Meta-Research Center at the Tillburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. But as researchers and advocates continue to push science to be more open and impartial, he says, fraud “will be less prevalent in the future.”

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