2024 Research Misconduct News

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Stephanie M. Lee

Littered throughout the troves of scholarly research are a few peculiar phrases. Allusions to “my last knowledge update.” Sentences beginning with “Certainly,” as in, “Certainly, here are some potential highlights for your paper.”

And occasionally, the ultra-frank admission: “I am an AI language model.”

Many publishers now require authors to disclose when they use large-language models like ChatGPT to help write their papers. But a substantial number seemingly aren’t, according to Alex Glynn, a research literacy and communications instructor at the University of Louisville.

Since March, he’s been compiling Academ-AI, a database of articles with likely, but undisclosed, chatbot-generated language. In a preprint last month, Glynn analyzed 500 of those papers and found that about 20 percent of them appeared in venues whose publishers explicitly require AI use to be disclosed.

Read more…

The Scientist
Danielle Gerhard, PhD

In 2015, Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney, noticed something strange while browsing papers related to her past research. A handful of papers recently published by separate research groups had all linked the expression of a gene that she had cloned in the 1990s with different types of cancer. Byrne, who had studied cancer-associated genes for more than two decades, recalled, “That struck me as strange because for many years no one had been interested in this gene.” In fact, in Byrne and her colleagues’ investigation of the gene, they realized early on that there was limited evidence for this gene as an important driver of cancer development. “If we, as the people who cloned the gene, weren't interested in the gene in cancer, well, why would anyone else be?” she wondered. 

When she looked into the details of the papers, including the methods and materials sections, she noticed several mistakes in the nucleotide sequences.1 “[The nucleotide sequences] weren't peripheral to the research; they were absolutely core to the research, so if they were wrong, everything was wrong,” said Byrne.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education
Rachel Mesch

One of my Ph.D. students has a question: “How will I know when I’m ready to publish?” She is eager and hardworking, and I recognize the drive along with the mingling of confidence and trepidation. To be in her position is to have achieved at every level of schooling only to pursue a career laced with uncertainty. One that depends, at least in part, on the support of one’s mentors.

I assure her that I will guide her. I tell her that this is what happened for me in graduate school as I earned my Ph.D. in French literature. One of my professors, I’ll call her J, told me that my paper for her graduate seminar on women writers could be published with some simple revisions, and directed me toward Joan Kelly-Gadol’s essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Not long after, I submitted my paper to the Romanic Review, where it appeared within a few months: “Did Women Have an Enlightenment? Graffigny’s Zilia as Female Philosophe.” It was my first publication.

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Nature
Diana Kwon

Since the explosion in popularity of generative artificial intelligence (AI), several scholarly publishers have forged agreements with technology companies looking to use content to train the large language models (LLMs) that underlie their AI tools. A new tracker aims to catalogue what deals are being made — and by whom.

“We were seeing announcements of these deals, and we got to thinking that this is starting to become a pattern,” says Roger Schonfeld, a co-creator of the tracker and vice-president of libraries, scholarly communication and museums at Ithaka S+R, a higher-education consulting firm in New York City. “We wanted to shine some light on not just the individual deals, but also what the overall pattern was starting to look like — and provide a source for the community.”

Schonfeld and his colleagues launched the Generative AI Licensing Agreement Tracker in October. It includes information about licensing deals — confirmed and forthcoming — between technology companies and six major academic publishers, including Wiley, Sage and Taylor & Francis. Schonfeld says that the list documents only public agreements, and that there are probably several others that remain undisclosed.

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Inside Higher Ed
Patrick Jack for Times Higher Education

Large numbers of biomedical scientists have tried and failed to replicate their own studies, with many not publishing their findings, a survey suggests.

Authors of the study warn that researchers’ failure to approach their own work rigorously creates “major issues in bias” and hampers innovation in science.

Their survey, of about 1,600 authors of biomedical science papers, found that 72 percent agreed there was a reproducibility crisis in their field.

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FORTUNE India
Manoj Sharma

In 2023, the name Dionisio Lorenzo Villegas, professor and dean at Spain’s Universidad Fernando Pessoa-Canarias in Las Palmas, started appearing in research papers across reputed journals. His collaborators came from far-flung regions such as India, China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea.

As it turned out, following an investigation by Retraction Watch, a platform that tracks retractions across scientific publications, he was part of the so-called “academic papermill”. Without actual research, he bought his way into these publications by paying $290-400 and managed to publish six-seven articles in reputed journals.

The ringmaster of the operation was Chennai-based Sarath Ranganthan, who ran an entity called iTrilon. Now disbanded, it sold authorship of ‘readymade papers’ to researchers.

Read more…

Nature
Diana Kwon

From scientists manipulating figures to the mass production of fake papers by paper mills, problematic manuscripts have long plagued the scholarly literature. Science sleuths work tirelessly to uncover this misconduct to correct the scientific record. But their job is becoming harder, owing to the introduction of a powerful new tool for fraudsters: generative artificial intelligence (AI).

“Generative AI is evolving very fast,” says Jana Christopher, an image-integrity analyst at FEBS Press in Heidelberg, Germany. “The people that work in my field — image integrity and publication ethics — are getting increasingly worried about the possibilities that it offers.”

The ease with which generative-AI tools can create text, images and data raises fears of an increasingly untrustworthy scientific literature awash with fake figures, manuscripts and conclusions that are difficult for humans to spot. Already, an arms race is emerging as integrity specialists, publishers and technology companies race to develop AI tools that can assist in rapidly detecting deceptive, AI-generated elements of papers.

“It’s a scary development,” Christopher says. “But there are also clever people and good structural changes that are being suggested.”

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PLOS ONE
Joao Phillipe Cardenuto, Daniel Moreira, Anderson Rocha

Abstract

The increasing prevalence of fake publications created by paper mills poses a significant challenge to maintaining scientific integrity. While integrity analysts typically rely on textual and visual clues to identify fake articles, determining which papers merit further investigation can be akin to searching for a needle in a haystack, as these fake publications have non-related authors and are published on non-related venues. To address this challenge, we developed a new methodology for provenance analysis, which automatically tracks and groups suspicious figures and documents. Our approach groups manuscripts from the same paper mill by analyzing their figures and identifying duplicated and manipulated regions. These regions are linked and organized in a provenance graph, providing evidence of systematic production. We tested our solution on a paper mill dataset of hundreds of documents and also on a larger version of the dataset that deliberately included thousands of documents intentionally selected to distract our method. Our approach successfully identified and linked systematically produced articles on both datasets by pinpointing the figures they reused and manipulated from one another. The technique herein proposed offers a promising solution to identify fraudulent manuscripts, and it could be a valuable tool for supporting scientific integrity.

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Springer Nature
Saskia Hoving

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in research holds promising benefits as well as potential threats. In a fascinating webinar titled Research integrity and AI: Navigating challenges and leveraging potential, Springer Nature’s Director of Research Integrity, Chris Graf, discusses research integrity, AI tools to detect fraudulent manuscripts, and the importance of collaboration in combating scientific misconduct. Read on for key insights from the webinar.

Research integrity is a topic of relevance to anyone within the academic ecosystem. As librarians, it is essential to understand research integrity: What the issues are, how they are addressed, and by whom. This will enable you to best support your researchers and institutions, and to participate integrally in the efforts to uphold research integrity. In the webinar Research integrity and AI: Navigating challenges and leveraging potential, Chris offered a holistic overview of research integrity, which would benefit any academic librarian in their everyday work.

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The Chronicle
Paul Bloom

You may have heard of the study published in 2020 concluding that Black newborns have higher survival rates when Black doctors attend to them. It got a huge amount of coverage in the popular press. It was even cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent last year on the court’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions. The research, Jackson claimed, shows the benefits of diversity. “It saves lives,” she wrote.

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ChemistryWorld
Rupali Dabas

Scientific Reports, a journal published by Springer Nature, has been criticised for publishing fraudulent research in an open letter signed by many well-known experts in research fraud. The letter highlights multiple cases where papers have passed peer review despite containing glaring issues, from irrelevant references and ‘tortured phrases’ to nonsensical figures.

The signatories of the letter, including well-known science sleuths Elisabeth Bik, Dorothy Bishop and Guillaume Cabanac, express disappointment over Springer Nature’s ‘inadequate’ response to reports of flawed publications. One notable example cited involved a recently corrected article that had been flagged for containing numerous ‘tortured phrases’, indicative of attempts to bypass plagiarism detection. ‘For it to be negligence would require a remarkable degree of professional incompetence from a handling editor,’ wrote the authors.

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Journal of Responsible Innovation
Serge P.J.M. Horbach, Rachel Fishberg, Sven Ulpts, & Lise Degn

ABSTRACT

Scandals involving cases of research misconduct are often considered to be main drivers for policy initiatives and institutional changes to foster research integrity. These impacts of scandals are usually witnessed during scandals’ peak visibility. In this article we change this perspective by examining the way in which scandals continue impacting academic institutions long after the initial attention has faded. To do so, we empirically study research integrity courses at multiple Danish universities. We combine data from document analysis, participatory observations and interviews. In addition, this article makes a conceptual contribution by introducing the notion of the ‘institutional afterlife’ of a scandal. We use this notion to demonstrate how scandals can affect academic communities and practices long after their initial visibility has faded, by re-entering communities and institutions. We thereby contribute a novel approach to studying scandals and their wider implications in academia.

Horbach, S. P. J. M., Fishberg, R., Ulpts, S., & Degn, L. (2024). Thou Shalt Not! – How the institutional afterlife of research misconduct scandals shapes research integrity training. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23299460.2024.2414500 

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Bloomberg
Jackie Davalos and Leon Yin

After taking some time off from college early in the pandemic to start a family, Moira Olmsted was eager to return to school. For months, she juggled a full-time job and a toddler to save up for a self-paced program that allowed her to learn remotely. Seven months pregnant with her second child, Olmsted enrolled in online courses at Central Methodist University in 2023, studying to become a teacher.

Just weeks into the fall semester, Olmsted submitted a written assignment in a required class—one of three reading summaries she had to do each week. Soon after, she received her grade: zero. When she approached her professor, Olmsted said she was told that an AI detection tool had determined her work was likely generated by artificial intelligence. In fact, the teacher said, her writing had been flagged at least once before.

For Olmsted, now 24, the accusation was a “punch in the gut.” It was also a threat to her standing at the university. “It’s just kind of like, oh my gosh, this is what works for us right now—and it could be taken away for something I didn’t do,” she says.

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BMC Research Integrity Peer Review
Robin Brooker & Nick Allum

Abstract

Background

This study investigates the determinants of engagement in questionable research practices (QRPs), focusing on both individual-level factors (such as scholarly field, commitment to scientific norms, gender, contract type, and career stage) and institution-level factors (including industry type, researchers' perceptions of their research culture, and awareness of institutional policies on research integrity).

Results

Our findings indicate that contract type, career stage, academic field, adherence to scientific norms and gender significantly predict QRP engagement. At the institution level, factors such as being outside of a collegial culture and experiencing harmful publication pressure, and the presence of safeguards against integrity breaches have small associations. Only a minimal amount of variance in QRP engagement is attributable to differences between institutions and countries.

Brooker, R., Allum, N. Investigating the links between questionable research practices, scientific norms and organisational culture. Res Integr Peer Rev 9, 12 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-024-00151-x

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BioPharma Dive
Meagan Parrish

Cassava Sciences has faced intense regulatory scrutiny over alleged clinical impropriety in studies of its experimental Alzheimer’s disease drug. Most recently, Cassava agreed to pay millions of dollars to resolve corporate misconduct allegations from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Now, some experts want Cassava to get more attention from the FDA and have its clinical programs halted.

Last week, the beleaguered biotech announced it will pay $40 million to resolve the SEC investigation into whether it misled investors with doctored data.

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The Transmitter
Calli McMurray

Daniel Heinz clicked through each folder in the file drive, searching for the answers that had evaded him and his lab mates for years.

Heinz, a graduate student in Brenda Bloodgood’s lab at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), was working on a Ph.D. project, part of which built on the work of a postdoctoral researcher who had left the lab and started his own a few years prior. The former postdoc studied how various types of electrical activity in the mouse hippocampus induce a gene called NPAS4 in different ways. One of his discoveries was that, in some situations, NPAS4 was induced in the far-reaching dendrites of neurons.

The postdoc’s work resulted in a paper in Cell, landed him more than $1.4 million in grants and an assistant professor position at the University of Utah, and spawned several follow-up projects in the lab. In other words, it was a slam dunk.

But no one else in the lab—including Heinz—could replicate the NPAS4 data. Other lab members always had a technical explanation for why the replication experiments failed, so for years the problem was passed from one trainee to another.

https://doi.org/10.53053/USNX9479

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ChemistryWorld
Rupali Dabas

Unacknowledged post-publication alterations, or stealth corrections, in peer-reviewed papers could signal deeper issues with transparency in scientific publishing, researchers have warned in a preprint. René Aquarius, a biomedical scientist at Radbound University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, Netherlands, and his fellow research-integrity sleuths, report 131 cases of what they call ‘stealth corrections’, where journals amend papers without any acknowledgement of their alterations.

Aquarius and his team discovered these cases by re-evaluating papers flagged on the post-publication peer review site, PubPeer, and monitoring the social media accounts of other sleuths. However, the true scale of the problem is likely to be far greater. To catch silent corrections, access to all versions of the papers are needed, and this can be challenging to obtain. ‘Unfortunately, journals and researchers are very reluctant to respond,’ says Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and scientific integrity expert.

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European Journal of Internal Medicine
David Ramoni, Cosimo Sgura, Luca Liberale, Fabrizio Montecucco, John P.A. Ioannidis, Federico Carbone

Abstract

The debate surrounding the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into scientific writing has already attracted significant interest in medical and life sciences. While AI can undoubtedly expedite the process of manuscript creation and correction, it raises several criticisms. The crossover between AI and health sciences is relatively recent, but the use of AI tools among physicians and other scientists who work in the life sciences is growing very fast. Within this whirlwind, it is becoming essential to realize where we are heading and what the limits are, including an ethical perspective.

Modern conversational AIs exhibit a context awareness that enables them to understand and remember any conversation beyond any predefined script. Even more impressively, they can learn and adapt as they engage with a growing volume of human language input. They all share neural networks as background mathematical models and differ from old chatbots for their use of a specific network architecture called transformer model [1]. Some of them exceed 100 terabytes (TB) (e.g., Bloom, LaMDA) or even 500 TB (e.g., Megatron-Turing NLG) of text data, the 4.0 version of ChatGPT (GPT-4) was trained with nearly 45 TB, but stays updated by the internet connection and may integrate with different plugins that enhance its functionality, making it multimodal.

Davide Ramoni, Cosimo Sgura, Luca Liberale, Fabrizio Montecucco, John P.A. Ioannidis, Federico Carbone, Artificial intelligence in scientific medical writing: Legitimate and deceptive uses and ethical concerns, European Journal of Internal Medicine, Volume 127, 2024, Pages 31-35, ISSN 0953-6205, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejim.2024.07.012.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education
Stephanie M. Lee

At first, it looked like a paradigm of science done right. A group of behavioral scientists had repeated the same experiments over and over in separate labs, following the same rigorous methods, and found that 86 percent of their attempts had the results they expected.

In a field where the seemingly constant collapse of influential discoveries over the past decade has triggered a reproducibility crisis, this finding was welcome news. The study’s authors included heavy hitters in the science-reform movement, and it appeared in a top journal, Nature Human Behaviour, in November.

“The high replication rate justifies confidence in rigour-enhancing methods to increase the replicability of new discoveries,” concluded the paper, which has been cited more than 70 times, according to Google Scholar. “The reforms are working,” a press release declared, and a news story asked: “What reproducibility crisis?”

But now the paper has been retracted, following a monthslong journal investigation into concerns about how it had been designed and written. For starters, it claimed that every aspect of the project had been “preregistered,” referring to the increasingly popular practice of publicly describing plans for a study ahead of time. The hope is that when researchers are held accountable to an original plan, they won’t be tempted to change course later to make their data “fit.”

Read more...

Medium
Adam Day

TL;DR: AI-generated-text detection ceased to be a good indicator of research fraud at the exact time that it became a good tool for generating fraudulent research.

…

I remember finding ChatGPT usage in a research paper for the first time.

It was April 2023, and a Twitter user pointed out that you could identify bots by their use of the phrase “as an AI language model…”. It’s a hallmark of ChatGPT usage. So I searched Google Scholar for the phrase

|“as an AI language model…” AND NOT chatgpt

… and found just one paper.

That paper must have been created and peer-reviewed without any of the ‘author’, editor, or reviewers actually reading it because the phrase couldn’t have been more obvious.

As detection methods go, this search is as basic as they come. I have no doubt that it missed most of the ChatGPT content in Google Scholar at the time. After trying it again just now, I found it harder to avoid false-positives.

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The Conversation
Nham Tran

When scientists make important discoveries, both big and small, they typically publish their findings in scientific journals for others to read. This sharing of knowledge helps to advance science: it can, in turn, lead to more important discoveries.

But published research papers can be retracted if there is an issue with their accuracy or integrity. And in recent years, the number of retractions has been rising sharply. For example, in 2023 more than 10,000 research papers were retracted globally. This marked a new record.

The huge number of retractions indicates a lot of government research funding is being wasted. More importantly, the publication of so much flawed research also misleads other researchers and undermines scientific integrity.

Fuelling this troubling trend is a mentality known in academia as “publish or perish” which has existed for decades. The publication of research papers drives university rankings and career progression, yet the relentless pressure to publish has contributed to an increase in fraudulent data. Unless this changes, the entire research landscape may shift toward a less rigorous standard, hindering vital progress in fields such as medicine, technology and climate science.

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STAT
Paul Martin Jensen

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services published new policies on research misconduct, which apply to research institutions receiving funding through the U.S. Public Health Service. The policies set standards that institutions must follow when investigating and potentially sanctioning researchers alleged to have engaged in research misconduct. Some of the significant changes include: streamlining the process for expanding inquiries to new leads, granting institutions 90 days to carry out inquiries instead of the previous 60, giving institutions discretion on when they require publications to be corrected, and establishing a clearer process for administering appeals.

HHS says they updated the policies partly in response to “growing public concerns about research integrity” as well as questions institutions have had about how to pursue allegations of research misconduct.

Among the vast numbers of researchers, surely most carry out their work with integrity. Yet every few weeks, it seems, a new high-profile allegation of misconduct — including data fabrication, image manipulation, and publication of faulty research in what are essentially fake journals — breaks into the news. Some have involved the country’s most prestigious institutions. Research misconduct has roiled the world of scientific publishing, too. In May, after retracting more than 11,000 papers, Wiley shuttered 19 health and medical journals found to be compromised by fraudulent science, including the Journal of Oncology, Advances in Preventive Medicine, and the International Journal of Chronic Diseases.

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Nature
Jane Feinmann

Electromagnetics researcher Akhlesh Lakhtakia is head of a leading US department of engineering science at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, the author of more than 840 journal articles and a fellow of 9 learned societies. But in 1988, when he was an assistant professor, a peer reviewer said of a paper he had submitted for publication: “This is rubbish. Obviously the author or authors had no EM [electromagnetics] training nor physical intuition.”

Peer review, which has for centuries been the standard tool to determine an academic paper’s suitability for publication, is known to be flawed1. Now, one of its major weaknesses, sheer bad manners on the part of the reviewer, has been highlighted in a YouTube video from IOP Publishing (IOPP), headquartered in Bristol, UK — a society-owned publisher of more than 90 journals.

Released to mark Peer Review Week, which this year runs from 23 to 27 September, the one-minute film features four scientists who hold placards showing the rude, inappropriate or irrelevant reviews that they received when they were early-career researchers. At the same time, an overlay lists their stellar achievements since. Activities taking place during this year’s Peer Review Week, involving more than 35 organizations around the world, will focus on innovation and technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and how it can be used to automate administrative tasks in the peer-review process.

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Nature
Gemma Conroy

An ideas generator powered by artificial intelligence (AI) came up with more original research ideas than did 50 scientists working independently, according to a preprint posted on arXiv this month1.

The human and AI-generated ideas were evaluated by reviewers, who were not told who or what had created each idea. The reviewers scored AI-generated concepts as more exciting than those written by humans, although the AI’s suggestions scored slightly lower on feasibility.

But scientists note that the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, has limitations. It focused on one area of research and required human participants to come up with ideas on the fly, which probably hindered their ability to produce their best concepts.

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BLOODHORSE
Frank Angst

A nine-page report released Sept. 17 from the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority and its enforcement arm alleges Dr. Scott Stanley was removed from his leadership position of the University of Kentucky's Equine Analytical Chemistry Laboratory because the lab failed to meet standards on several fronts.

Perhaps the most concerning of those allegations is that the lab, under Stanley's direction, failed to perform confirmatory analysis on samples whose initial screening showed the potential presence of a prohibited substance.

Also Tuesday morning, the University of Kentucky issued a release saying it would move to terminate Stanley's employment after it concluded that he did not follow appropriate business practices in reporting equine drug tests and did not honor certain standards and obligations. Those allegations were detailed in a 25-page draft audit report from the university.

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Nature
Dan Garisto

When bioinformatician Sam Payne was asked to review a manuscript on a topic relevant to his own work, he agreed — not anticipating just how relevant it would be.

The manuscript, which was sent to Payne in March, was about a study on the effect of cell sample sizes for protein analysis. “I immediately recognized it,” says Payne, who is at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The text, he says, was similar to that of a paper he’d authored three years earlier, but the most striking feature was the plots: several were identical down to the last data point. He fired off an e-mail to the journal, BioSystems, which promptly rejected the manuscript.

In July, Payne discovered that the manuscript had been published in the journal Proteomics, and he alerted the editors. On 15 August, the journal retracted the paper. An accompanying statement cited “major unattributed overlap between the figures” in it and Payne’s work. In response to questions from Nature, a spokesperson for Wiley, which publishes Proteomics, said, “This paper was simultaneously submitted to multiple journals and included plagiarized images.”

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"There are no capital requirements or significant technological barriers, anyone can create papers by rewriting already published works, either themselves or with the assistance of ChatGPT or other software. With a Telegram channel or WhatsApp group the papermiller can easily organise the sale of authorship" - Nick Wise

For Better Science
Nick Wise

Nick Wise wrote about some bottom-feeding papermillers and their bottom-feeding Iraqi papermill which sells plagiarised papers. The customers are not only Iraqis and other Arabs, but also Poles, Hungarians, and russians, the authorships are sold on Telegram and WhatsApp. The extra bit of irony: those from whom the cheap Iraqi papermill steals, may have obtained their papers from a higher quality Iranian papermill.

Nick’s article contains additional text provided by me (Leonid Schneider).

Incidentally, the main protagonist of the story, the Iraqi papermill fraudster Qusay Hassan, wrote to me just before this very article was published, to complain about reader comments from May 2024:

“I am writing to urgently request the removal of a comment posted on your platform that targets me and my co-authors in a defamatory and unfounded manner. […] it does not adhere to the principles of fair and evidence-based academic discussion. It is important to maintain the integrity of your platform and ensure that it is not used as a tool for personal vendettas or defamation.”

I think the word “vendetta” must be copyrighted as an exclusively academic term. The other protagonist of this story and Hassan’s coauthor and PhD mentor, the Polish professor Marek Jaszczur, did not reply when asked to comment.

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The One Deeper Blog & Podcast
Udesh Habaraduwa

In this episode, I'm joined by Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch and journalist in residence, teaching both graduate and undergraduate students, at NYU. Ivan has a wealth of experience in science journalism and is a vocal advocate for transparency in scientific publishing.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Scientific Integrity and Fraud: Exploring the challenges of maintaining integrity in science and the prevalence of fraudulent behavior in academia.
• Incentives in Science: How current metrics and incentives may encourage poor scientific practices and how they could be improved.
• Retraction Watch: The role of Retraction Watch in promoting transparency and accountability in research through its extensive database of retractions.
• Peer Review and Publication Pressure: A discussion on the limitations of the peer review process and the pressure to "publish or perish" in academia.

Resources:

Nobel Laureates on how to do great work in science.

Does Science Self-Correct? What We`ve Learned at Retraction Watch, Ivan Oransky

Ivan Oransky Co-Founder of Retraction Watch Discusses Scientific Research Integrity

Goodhart’s Law

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The Wall Street Journal
Nidhi Subbaraman

Four years ago, a team of researchers led by a heavyweight in the field of microbiology made a stunning claim: Cancers have unique microbial signatures that could one day allow tumors to be diagnosed with a blood test. 

The discovery captured the attention of the scientific community, as well as investors. 

A prestigious journal published the research. More than 600 papers cited the study. At least a dozen groups based new work on its data. And the microbiologists behind the claim launched a startup to capitalize on their findings. 

Since then, the work has suffered multiple setbacks. 

The paper was retracted in June following criticisms by other scientists who questioned the methodology and said the findings are likely invalid. Support for the startup has dried up. And published research that relied on the study’s data might have to be corrected or retracted. 

The events illustrate the far-reaching ripple effect of flawed science. 

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Science
Janneke Gerards

An accommodating and supportive environment is essential to conducting scientific research. Yet, in almost every country, researchers can experience harassment, threats, prosecution, or even violence for opinions they express or for their work in relation to high-profile issues. Although many international and regional reports on this issue are patchy in terms of comprehensiveness and representation, they reveal clear and worrying trends—namely, that researchers working in politically charged fields such as public health, climate, and sexual and reproductive rights are prone to threats to their safety. The scientific community must heighten awareness and catalyze change if science is to remain a bedrock of societal well-being.

Surveys in 2021 and 2022 showed that 22% and 38% of respondent researchers, respectively, received threats of violence after talking to the media about COVID-19. Similarly, a worldwide survey by Global Witness published in 2023 found that 39% of respondents experienced online harassment or abuse related to their climate research. And as documented in Scholars at Risk’s annual monitor, students and scholars working in all fields fall victim to attacks—nearly 300 instances have been recorded from across the world between August 2023 and August 2024.

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Times Higher Education
Jonathan Taylor

It’s November 1983. I’m in the final year of primary school. It’s playtime and I’m alone, hiding in the wasteland behind one of the school’s mobile huts. The hut’s painted a similar green to my school sweatshirt, so I’m hoping I’m camouflaged, like the chameleons we’ve been studying in class. I’m hoping I’m safe.

I’m not: two minutes later, my arch-nemesis Lee Hardwick (not his real name) sidles round one side of the building, his three sidekicks round the other. I’m cornered.

‘Don’t be scared,’ says Lee. ‘We only want a little chat with you.’ He seems reasonable, placatory: ‘I’m not that bad, you know. But you and me, we never seem to get on. I dunno why.’

‘You’re bullying me,” I say. Lee snorts: “Don’t be silly. I’m not a bully.’

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Nature
Guillaume Cabanac

Article retractions have been growing steadily over the past few decades, soaring to a record-breaking figure of nearly 14,000 last year, compared with less than 1,000 per year before 2009 (see go.nature.com/3azcxan and go.nature.com/3x9uxfn).

Retracting flawed research papers is part of a healthy scientific process. Not all retractions stem from misconduct — they can also occur when mistakes happen, such as when a research group realizes it can’t reproduce its results.

But regardless of how erroneous results found their way into a published paper, it is important that they are not propagated in the scientific literature. No one wants to base their reasoning on false premises. In the same way that many people wouldn’t accept a medical treatment bolstered by shaky clinical trials, the scientific community doesn’t want researchers, the public and, increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) to rely on erroneous data or conclusions from retracted articles.

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Retraction Watch
Ellie Kincaid

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. 

...Of the 13 papers in which Eckert faked Western blot and microscopy image data, according to ORI, four have been corrected and one retracted, and Eckert must request corrections or retractions for the remaining eight. The 13 papers have been cited 488 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. ...

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Drug Discovery News (DDN)
Stephanie DeMarco, PhD

I distinctly remember the day I saw a western blot band stretched, rotated, and pasted into another panel. Zoomed out, it looked like a perfectly normal blot; the imposter band sat amongst the others like it had always been there.

Sitting at a long table with the other graduate students on my training grant, I watched as our professor showed us example after example of images from published scientific papers that had been manipulated to embellish the data. I really appreciate that course and the other research integrity courses I took during my research training for teaching me and my peers how to spot bad science and what to do when we encounter it. It made me a better scientist when I was in the lab, and now, it makes me a better journalist.

When bad science infiltrates the publication record, researchers unwittingly build their own research programs around shaky science. Not only does this waste researchers’ time and money, but it affects real people’s lives. 

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PsyArXiv Preprints
Michele B. Nuijten and Jelte Wicherts

Abstract

We investigated whether statistical reporting inconsistencies could be avoided if journals implement the tool statcheck in the peer review process. In a preregistered pretest-posttest quasi-experiment covering over 7000 articles and over 147,000 extracted statistics, we compared the prevalence of reported p-values that were inconsistent with their degrees of freedom and test statistic in two journals that implemented statcheck in their peer review process (Psychological Science and Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology) and two matched control journals (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, respectively), before and after statcheck was implemented. Preregistered multilevel logistic regression analyses showed that the decrease in both inconsistencies and decision inconsistencies around p = .05 is considerably steeper in statcheck journals than in control journals, offering preliminary support for the notion that statcheck can be a useful tool for journals to avoid statistical reporting inconsistencies in published articles. We discuss limitations and implications of these findings.

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Nature
Sarah Wild

When a scientist is found to have harassed a colleague or student, it can reverberate through the research community — sometimes for decades. Not knowing how to treat the parties involved and a lack of guidelines for how to handle a harasser’s data, research, collaborations and publications can tear specialities apart. A debate is unfolding about how institutions handle sexual-harassment and bullying-misconduct cases — and whether there’s a way to deal with them that would heal communities rather than cause more harm.

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Nature
Smriti Mallapaty

“I had no choice but to commit [research] misconduct,” admits a researcher at an elite Chinese university. The shocking revelation is documented in a collection of several dozen anonymous, in-depth interviews offering rare, first-hand accounts of researchers who engaged in unethical behaviour — and describing what tipped them over the edge. An article based on the interviews was published in April in the journal Research Ethics¹.

The interviewer, sociologist Zhang Xinqu, and his colleague Wang Peng, a criminologist, both at the University of Hong Kong, suggest that researchers felt compelled, and even encouraged, to engage in misconduct to protect their jobs. This pressure, they conclude, ultimately came from a Chinese programme to create globally recognized universities. The programme prompted some Chinese institutions to set ambitious publishing targets, they say.

The article offers “a glimpse of the pain and guilt that researchers felt” when they engaged in unethical behaviour, says Elisabeth Bik, a scientific-image sleuth and consultant in San Francisco, California.

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Science
Charles Pillar

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. The study has been cited nearly 2500 times, and would be the most cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch data.

“Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago,” Ashe wrote on PubPeer, “it is clear that several of the figures in Lesné et al. (2006) have been manipulated … for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility.”

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Nature
Holly Else

The retraction rate for European biomedical-science papers increased fourfold between 2000 and 2021, a study of thousands of retractions has found.

Two-thirds of these papers were withdrawn for reasons relating to research misconduct, such as data and image manipulation or authorship fraud. These factors accounted for an increasing proportion of retractions over the roughly 20-year period, the analysis suggests.

“Our findings indicate that research misconduct has become more prevalent in Europe over the last two decades,” write the authors, led by Alberto Ruano‐Ravina, a public-health researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

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The Harvard Crimson
Angelina J. Parker and Neil H. Shah

Plagiarism is a cardinal offense for academics. In December, it also became the latest cudgel in the conservative culture war on Harvard and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The development could not have come at a worse time for the University. Harvard was struggling to navigate public fallout from former President Claudine Gay’s now-infamous congressional hearing. The University was under a national microscope like never before, and politicians, alumni, and Harvard affiliates were calling for Gay’s resignation.

And amidst it all — as the Harvard Corporation met to discuss Gay’s future at the University — right-wing activist Christopher F. Rufo and journalist Christopher Brunet hit publish on a piece that would add a new element to the controversy: allegations that Gay had plagiarized large sections of her Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard.

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Intelligencer
Kevin T. Dugan

Junk science has been forcing a reckoning among scientific and medical researchers for the past year, leading to thousands of retracted papers. Last year, Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned amid reporting that some of his most high-profile work on Alzheimer’s disease was at best inaccurate. (A probe commissioned by the university’s board of trustees later exonerated him of manipulating the data).

But the problems around credible science appear to be getting worse. Last week, scientific publisher Wiley decided to shutter 19 scientific journals after retracting 11,300 sham papers. There is a large-scale industry of so-called “paper mills” that sell fictive research, sometimes written by artificial intelligence, to researchers who then publish it in peer-reviewed journals — which are sometimes edited by people who had been placed by those sham groups. Among the institutions exposing such practices is Retraction Watch, a 14-year-old organization co-founded by journalists Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus. I spoke with Oransky about why there has been a surge in fake research and whether fraud accusations against the presidents of Harvard and Stanford are actually good for academia.

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Nature
Malte Elson

In 2023, Google awarded a total of US$10 million to researchers who found vulnerabilities in its products. Why? Because allowing errors to go undetected could be much costlier. Data breaches could lead to refund claims, reduced customer trust or legal liability.

It’s not just private technology companies that invest in such ‘bug bounty’ programmes. Between 2016 and 2021, the US Department of Defense awarded more than US$650,000 to people who found weaknesses in its networks.

Just as many industries devote hefty funding to incentivizing people to find and report bugs and glitches, so the science community should reward the detection and correction of errors in the scientific literature. In our industry, too, the costs of undetected errors are staggering.

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The British Psychological Society (the psychologist)
Dr. Alon Zivony

In a recent study, US researchers claimed to have found that Black and Hispanic Americans are not more likely to be fatally shot by police officers than White Americans. Unsurprisingly, this study got a lot of attention with over 100 news outlets covering it and millions of people discussing it on social media. Meanwhile, scientists criticised the study for its analyses, claiming they were so flawed that they invalidated the conclusions entirely. At first, the authors rejected the criticisms.

But then, something almost unprecedented happened: in response to the public debate, the authors decided to retract their paper due to 'the continued use' of the work to 'support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general'. In other words, this highly visible paper was retracted, not because of flaws in the methodology, but because of ethical concerns about its adverse impacts on society.

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Psychology Today
Matt Grawitch, Ph.D.

A recent Psychology Today post by Miller (2024) discussed the results of a research study¹ that included a sample of more than 10,000 researchers from Sweden. Respondents were provided with a description of ethical research practices (Figure 1) and asked to rate (1) how well they applied ethical research practices relative to others in their field and (2) how well researchers in their field applied ethical research practices relative to those in other fields.

The study itself was not overly complex (in fact, each rating was just a single item). When it came to rating their own application of research ethics, 55 percent rated themselves as equal to their peers, close to 45 percent rated themselves as better, and less than 1 percent rated themselves as worse. When it came to assessing others in their field, 63 percent rated their field as similar to others, 29 percent rated their field as better, and close to 8 percent rated their field as worse.

Read more…

Nature
Dalmeet Singh Chawla

A free online tool released earlier this month alerts researchers if a paper cites studies that are mentioned on the website PubPeer, a forum scientists often use to raise integrity concerns surrounding published papers.

Studies are usually flagged on PubPeer when readers have suspicions, for example about image manipulation, plagiarism, data fabrication or artificial intelligence (AI)-generated text. PubPeer already offers its own browser plug-in that alerts users if a study that they are reading has been posted on the site. The new tool, a plug-in released on 13 April by RedacTek, based in Oakland, California, goes further — it searches through reference lists for papers that have been flagged. The software pulls information from many sources, including PubPeer’s database; data from the digital-infrastructure organization Crossref, which assigns digital object identifiers to articles; and OpenAlex, a free index of hundreds of millions of scientific documents.

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Vox
Kelsey Piper

When it is alleged that a scientist has manipulated data behind their published papers, there’s an important but miserable project ahead: looking through the rest of their published work to see if any of that is fabricated as well. 

After dishonesty researcher Francesca Gino was placed on leave at Harvard Business School last fall following allegations that four of her papers contained manipulated data, the people who’d co-authored other papers with her scrambled to start double-checking their published works. 

Read more…

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Francie Diep

The National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Army are withholding all of their grants from the University of California at San Diego because one scientist failed to turn in required final reports for two of his grants, according to a message sent to the campus community on Tuesday.

“This action is the result of one Principal Investigator’s extended non-submission of final technical reports for two awards,” Corinne Peek-Asa, vice chancellor for research and innovation, wrote in the message. “If you are a PI receiving a new or continuing award from one of these agencies, you will receive a notice that the award will be delayed.”

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The Chronicle of Higher Education
Michael Vasquez

Higher education has long been dogged by the “pass-the-harasser” phenomenon, in which employees found responsible for sexual misconduct have been allowed to quietly depart their colleges, only to be hired by other campuses who knew nothing of their misdeeds. Sometimes the misconduct continues.

That is slowly changing. California is the latest state to consider enacting a law that would require colleges to contact job applicants’ current or past employers to ask about policy violations. Assembly Bill 810, part of a larger package of anti-harassment legislation, has been passed by the state’s lower chamber and is now in the Senate.

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Nature
Dan Garisto

Ranga Dias, the physicist at the centre of the room-temperature superconductivity scandal, committed data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, according to a investigation commissioned by his university. Nature’s news team discovered the bombshell investigation report in court documents.

The ten-month investigation, which concluded on 8 February, was carried out by an independent group of scientists recruited by the University of Rochester in New York. They examined 16 allegations against Dias and concluded that it was more likely than not that in each case, the physicist had committed scientific misconduct. The university is now attempting to fire Dias, who is a tenure-track faculty member at Rochester, before his contract expires at the end of the 2024–25 academic year.

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Science
Denis Meuthen

When I started my faculty position, I was excited to be leading my own lab—and nervous. I’m legally deaf and rely on lip-reading for verbal communication. I had managed fine as a graduate student and postdoc, though not without misunderstandings and challenges. But leading a team was different. I worried about whether I would be able to communicate effectively with my lab members, and also whether they would respect me. My pronunciation is sometimes off because of my disability, which leads some people to judge my intelligence as lacking. I set out unsure how to navigate these uncertain waters. But after almost 2 years in the position, I’ve come up with a set of solutions for how best to communicate with my trainees. Many would be useful for any lab head, disabled or not.

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Microbiology Society
Elisabeth M. Bik

Abstract

Scientists face challenges in publishing negative results, because most scientific journals are biassed in accepting positive and novel findings. Despite their importance, negative results often go unpublished, leading to duplication of efforts, biassed meta-analyses, and ethical concerns regarding animal and human studies. In this light, the initiative by Access Microbiology to collect and publish negative results in the field of microbiology is a very important and valuable contribution towards unbiassed science.

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Bik, E. M. (2024). Publishing negative results is good for science. Access Microbiology, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1099/acmi.0.000792

Inside Higher Ed
Kathryn Palmer

The federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) is proposing changes that would give the government more oversight of investigations of research misconduct at colleges and universities.

But scores of university and research hospital leaders and the organizations representing them are opposed and say the proposed rules would be burdensome to institutions and could potentially deter people from reporting alleged research misconduct, among other perceived negative consequences.

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Nature
Sumeet Kulkarni

It was in just the second article of more than 1,000 that Otto Kalliokoski was screening that he spotted what he calls a “Photoshop masterpiece”.

The paper showed images from western blots — a technique used to analyse protein composition — for two samples. But Kalliokoski, an animal behaviourist at the University of Copenhagen, found that the images were identical down to the pixel, which he says is clearly not supposed to happen.

Image manipulation in scientific studies is a known and widespread problem. All the same, Kalliokoski and his colleagues were startled to come across more than 100 studies with questionable images while compiling a systematic review about a widely used test of laboratory rats’ moods

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The Wall Street Journal
Melissa Korn and Nidhi Subbaraman

Research universities and hospitals are pushing back against a federal agency’s proposal to boost oversight of investigations related to fraud and plagiarism, even as many face questions over the credibility of their scientists’ work.

The Office of Research Integrity, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, oversees more than $40 billion in research funds and is calling for more transparency in research-misconduct investigations. The recommended changes come amid high-profile cases at schools including Stanford University, Harvard Medical School and the University of Rochester. 

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Nature
Morteza Mohmoudi

I experienced a wide spectrum of academic bullying and eventually had to quit a job because of it. It was a heart-wrenching decision. Since my departure, I’ve found peace in a supportive work environment. I was determined to use all the available means to prevent others from facing similar situations.

So, alongside my scientific work, I study the root causes of academic bullying and harassment and seek solutions to them. I forgave my bully last year, but I still find it challenging to forgive those who protected the bully and ultimately forced my departure.

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Nature
Reint A. Meursinge Reynders, David Cavagnetto, Gerben ter Riet, Nicola Dr Girolamo, & Mario Malicki

Abstract

A systematic review with meta-analysis was conducted to assess the prevalence of automatically listing (a) senior member(s) of a department as co-author(s) on all submitted articles in health sciences and the prevalence of degrees of support on a 5-point justification scale. Survey research was searched in PubMed, Lens.org, and Dimensions.ai. until January 5 2023. We assessed the methodological quality of studies and conducted quantitative syntheses. We identified 15 eligible surveys, that provided 67 results, all of which were rated as having low quality. A pooled estimate of 20% [95% CI 16–25] (10 surveys, 3619 respondents) of researchers in various health sciences reported that a senior member of their department was automatically listed as an author on all submitted articles. Furthermore, 28% [95% CI 22–34] of researchers (10 surveys, 2180 respondents) felt that this practice was ‘never’, 24% [95% CI 22–27] ‘rarely’, 25% [95% CI 23–28] ‘sometimes’, 13% [95% CI 9–17] ‘most of the time’, and 8% [95% CI 6–9] ‘always justified’. The practice of automatically assigning senior members of departments as co-authors on all submitted manuscripts may be common in the health sciences; with those admitting to this practice finding it unjustified in most cases.

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Meursinge Reynders, R.A., Cavagnetto, D., ter Riet, G. et al. Automatically listing senior members of departments as co-authors is highly prevalent in health sciences: meta-analysis of survey research. Sci Rep 14, 5883 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-55966-x

Nature
Dan Garisto

In 2020, Ranga Dias was an up-and-coming star of the physics world. A researcher at the University of Rochester in New York, Dias achieved widespread recognition for his claim to have discovered the first room-temperature superconductor, a material that conducts electricity without resistance at ambient temperatures. Dias published that finding in a landmark Nature paper¹.

Nearly two years later, that paper was retracted. But not long after, Dias announced an even bigger result, also published in Nature: another room-temperature superconductor². Unlike the previous material, the latest one supposedly worked at relatively modest pressures, raising the enticing possibility of applications such as superconducting magnets for medical imaging and powerful computer chips.

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Medscape
Robert Villa, MD

A drawing of a rat with four testicles and a giant penis was included in a scientific paper and recently circulated on social media and in online publications. It graphically represents the outcome of disregarding the quality of science produced each year in favor of its quantity.

For many years, there has been talk of paper mills: publishers who print scientific journals and articles for a fee without caring about the reliability of their research. These publishers of what are called predatory journals sometimes seem not to care whether their authors even exist. The business pleases publishing groups paid by researchers, researchers who can increase the number of their publications (which is crucial for their professional evaluation), institutions that can boast of researchers who publish a lot, and sometimes, even interest groups outside academia or research centers that exploit the system to give scientific legitimacy to their demands (as has sometimes happened within antivaccine movements). Serious scientists and, above all, trust in science suffer.

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Science
Holly Else

A Silicon Valley investor has pledged $1 million to help pay the legal costs of scientists being sued for flagging fraudulent research. Yun-Fang Juan, an engineer and data scientist by background, hopes the new Scientific Integrity Fund—the first of its kind—will make speaking up about wrongdoing less intimidating. The fund comes after a spate of cases in which high-profile scientists have retracted papers after whistleblowers made allegations of research fraud.

“As scientists, we need to be able to ask questions and raise concerns about other researchers’ work, without the risk of being sued, or going bankrupt because we have to hire a lawyer,” says prominent science sleuth Elisabeth Bik, an adviser to the fund.

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PNAS
Arthur Lupia, David B. Allison, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Jennifer Heimberg, Magdalena Skipper, and Susan Wolf

Abstract

In recent years, many questions have been raised about whether public confidence in science is changing. To clarify recent trends in the public’s confidence and factors that are associated with these feelings, an effort initiated by the National Academies’ Strategic Council for Research Excellence, Integrity, and Trust (the Strategic Council) analyzed findings from multiple survey research organizations. The Strategic Council’s effort, which began in 2022, found that U.S. public confidence in science, the scientific community, and leaders of scientific communities is high relative to other civic, cultural, and governmental institutions for which researchers regularly collect such data. 

Read more...

Lupia, Arthur, et al. “Trends in U.S. Public Confidence in Science and Opportunities for Progress.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 121, no. 11, 4 Mar. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2319488121. Accessed 18 Mar. 2024.

STAT News
Deborah Balthazar

Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist by training, has become one of the world’s most influential science detectives. An authority on scientific image analysis who’s been profiled in The New Yorker for her unique ability to spot duplicated or doctored photographs, she appeared frequently in the news over the past year as one of the experts who raised research misconduct concerns that led to an investigation into, and the eventual departure of, former Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne.

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Taylor & Francis Online
David B. Resnik, Mohammad Hosseini, & Lisa Rasmussen

ABSTRACT

Investigating research misconduct allegations against top officials can create significant conflicts of interest (COIs) for universities that may require changes to existing oversight frameworks. One way of addressing some of these challenges is to develop policies and procedures that specifically address investigation of allegations of misconduct involving top university officials. Steps can also be taken now regardless of whether such a body is created. Federal and university research misconduct regulations and policies may need to be revised to provide institutions with clearer guidance on how to deal with misconduct allegations against top officials. For their part, institutions may benefit from proactively creating and transparently disclosing their own processes for independent investigation of research misconduct allegations against senior officials.

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David B Resnik, Mohammad Hosseini & Lisa Rasmussen (2024) Responding to research misconduct allegations brought against top university officials, Accountability in Research, DOI: 10.1080/08989621.2024.2321179

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Stephanie M. Lee

Scientific-misconduct accusations are leading to retractions of high-profile papers, forcing reckonings within fields and ending professorships, even presidencies. But there’s no telling how widespread errors are in research: As it is, they’re largely brought to light by unpaid volunteers.

A program launching this month is hoping to shake up that incentive structure.

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Science
Dennis Normile

Last week, bioinformatician Yves Moreau of KU Leuven scored an important victory: The journal Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine retracted 18 papers from Chinese institutions because of ethical concerns. Moreau has long waged a solo campaign against studies that fail to get proper free and informed consent when collecting genetic samples, especially from vulnerable populations in China. He had raised questions about the now-retracted papers in 2021 and says this appears to be the largest set of retractions ever over human rights issues.

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Science
H. Holden Thorp

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann was awarded more than $1 million in a lawsuit against bloggers who accused him of scientific misconduct in inflammatory terms, likening his treatment of data to what a noted child molester did to children. The verdict suggests that there are limits to which scientists working on politically sensitive topics can be falsely attacked. But the case also says something profound about the difference between matters of opinion and scientific interpretations that can be worked out through normal academic processes. Although Mann has expressed strong—and even intemperate—emotions and words in political discourse, the finding of the District of Columbia Superior Court boiled down to the fact that it is not an opinion that determines when scientific misconduct occurs but rather, misconduct can be established using known processes.

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Science
Katie Langin

In 2023, a new Google Scholar profile appeared online featuring a researcher no one had ever heard of. Within a few months, the scientist, an expert in fake news, was listed by the scholarly database as their field’s 36th most cited researcher. They had an h-index of 19—meaning they’d published 19 academic articles that had been cited at least 19 times each. It was an impressive burst onto the academic publishing scene.

But none of it was legitimate. The researcher and their institution were fictional, created by researchers at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi who were probing shady publishing practices. The publications were written by ChatGPT. And the citation numbers were bogus: Some came from the author excessively citing their own “work,” while 50 others had been purchased for $300 from a vendor offering a “citations booster service.”

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STAT
Angus Chen and Jonathan Wosen

There was a time when an allegation of data mishandling, scientific misconduct, or just a technical error felt like a crisis to Barrett Rollins, an oncologist and research integrity officer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Now, it’s just another Tuesday.

The renowned cancer treatment and research center is in the midst of a lengthy review of possible discrepancies involving around 60 papers co-authored by four of its top researchers over a period of over 15 years, including CEO Laurie Glimcher and COO William Hahn. And it’s hardly alone. Over the past decade, the number of research misconduct allegations reported to the National Institutes of Health has more than doubled, climbing from 74 in 2013 to 169 in 2022. And scientific sleuths are finding plenty of other problems that don’t always qualify as outright misconduct.

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Nature
Nicola Jones

It seems that every month brings a fresh slew of high-profile allegations against researchers whose papers — some of them years old — contain signs of possible image manipulation .

Scientist sleuths are using their own trained eyes, along with commercial software based on artificial intelligence (AI), to spot image duplication and other issues that might hint at sloppy record-keeping or worse. They are bringing these concerns to light in places like PubPeer, an online forum featuring many new posts every day flagging image concerns.

Some of these efforts have led to action. Last month, for example, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, said that it would ask journals to retract or correct a slew of papers authored by its staff members. The disclosure came after an observer raised concerns about images in the papers. The institute says it is continuing to investigate the concerns.

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Taylor & Francis Online
Marijke Schotanus-Dijkstra

Dear Professor Covan,

You have recently decided to retract the paper of Hania et al. (Citation2022). Thank you for inviting me to explain why I was suspicious about the originality of this paper which led to this retraction.

I am currently working on a scoping review about flourishing mental health during the menopausal transition. First, I read around 250 papers after initial screening of titles and abstracts. Second, I started with the data extraction process in which at that point around 40 articles were extracted in an Excel datafile. I started to impute the data of the paper of Iioka and Komatsu (Citation2015), but I discovered that in each of the columns, except for “study” and “country,” Excel showed me the exact or almost exact answer with the information I wanted to extract. For some columns like the age range and mean age (SD), this might be possible as some articles use similar datasets. Yet, the further I worked on the extraction for this paper, the more suspicious I got because each column seemed to be identical to one particular article, the one of Hania et al. (Citation2022). Especially the exact same key-findings of the exact same outcomes was disturbing.

Read more...

Marijke Schotanus-Dijkstra (2024) An accidental discovery of scientific fraud: A reconstruction, Health Care for Women International, DOI: 10.1080/07399332.2024.2310709

Nature
Dalmeet Singh Chawla

A research-technology firm has developed a new approach to help identify journal articles that originate from paper mills — companies that churn out fake or poor-quality studies and sell authorships.

The technique, described in a preprint posted on arXiv last month ¹ , uses factors such as the combination of a paper’s authors to flag suspicious studies. Its developers at London-based firm Digital Science say it can help to identify cases in which researchers might have bought their way onto a paper.

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Nature
E. M. Wolkovich

I have just been accused of scientific fraud. Not data fraud — no one accused me of fabricating or misleadingly manipulating data or results. This, I suppose, is a relief because my laboratory, which studies how global change reshapes ecological communities, works hard to ensure that data are transparent and sharable, and that our work is reproducible. Instead, I was accused of writing fraud: passing off ‘writing’ produced by artificial intelligence (AI) as my own. That hurts, because — like many people — I find writing a paper to be a somewhat painful process. I read books on how to write — both to be comforted by how much these books stress that writing is generally slow and difficult, and to find ways to improve. My current strategy involves willing myself to write and creating several outlines before the first draft, which is followed by writing and a lot of revising. I always suggest this approach to my students, although I know it is not easy, because I think it’s important that scientists try to communicate well.

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The Guardian
Robin McKie

Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.

Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.

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The Cancer Letter
Jacquelyn Cobb

More than a decade ago, Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis published a paper with astounding findings: of 53 “landmark” studies, only six, or 11%, were reproducible, even with the same reagents and the same protocols—and even, sometimes, in the same laboratory—as the original study.

Begley’s and Ellis’s classic paper, published in Nature, gave rise to a movement that captured the attention of the uppermost crust of biomedical research. 

Then NCI Director Harold Varmus, for example, focused on the paper—and the broader problem of reproducibility—at a 2013 meeting of the National Cancer Advisory Board (The Cancer Letter, Dec. 3, 2013). In 2014, Francis Collins and Lawrence Tabak, then-director and then-deputy director of NIH, outlined the institute’s plan to address the issue of reproducibility in biomedical research. Journals and funding agencies took action. Declarations, meetings, and reports suddenly materialized, and research funders rapidly responded.

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Forbes
James Broughel

A December article in Nature highlighted an alarming new record: more than 10,000 academic papers were retracted in 2023 alone, largely stemming from manipulation of the peer review and publication processes. Over 8,000 of the retractions came from journals run by the Egyptian company Hindawi, a subsidiary of Wiley, and many were in special issues, which are collections of articles often overseen by guest editors that can have laxer standards than normal.

For now, researchers from countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China face the highest retraction rates, but it is sensible to ask: what would happen if a major scandal hit a mainstream American discipline? The idea seems less far-fetched than it used to. With disgraced ex-Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and former Harvard President Claudia Gay's academic records fresh in public memory, a scandal involving elite American researchers and universities is all too plausible.

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Nature
Hunter Moseley

We are in the middle of a data-driven science boom. Huge, complex data sets, often with large numbers of individually measured and annotated ‘features’, are fodder for voracious artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning systems, with details of new applications being published almost daily.

But publication in itself is not synonymous with factuality. Just because a paper, method or data set is published does not mean that it is correct and free from mistakes. Without checking for accuracy and validity before using these resources, scientists will surely encounter errors. In fact, they already have.

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AP News
Carla K. Johnson

Allegations of research fakery at a leading cancer center have turned a spotlight on scientific integrity and the amateur sleuths uncovering image manipulation in published research.

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, announced Jan. 22 it’s requesting retractions and corrections of scientific papers after a British blogger flagged problems in early January.

The blogger, 32-year-old Sholto David, of Pontypridd, Wales, is a scientist-sleuth who detects cut-and-paste image manipulation in published scientific papers.

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ScienceEditor
Dror Kolodkin-Gal

Scientific publishing serves as a vital medium for sharing research results with the global scientific community. The images within an article are often integral to conveying those results clearly. However, with researchers sometimes including hundreds of sub-images in a manuscript, manually ensuring all images accurately depict the data they are intended to represent can be a challenge. Here, cancer researcher and founder of an artificial intelligence (AI) image-checking software tool,¹ Dr Dror Kolodkin-Gal, explores how researchers and editors can improve image integrity, and how AI can streamline the publishing process.

AI and the future of image integrity in scientific publishinghttps://doi.org/10.36591/SE-4701-02

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ChemistryWorld
Rebecca Trager

A microbiologist has won her case for unfair dismissal against a US federal agency after she blew the whistle on animal welfare and biosafety failures. The US Geological Survey (USGS) hired Evi Emmenegger as a fisheries microbiologist in 1994, and in 2006 promoted her to manager of the highest biosafety level containment laboratory at the agency’s Western Fisheries Research Center (WFRC) in Seattle. But in 2017, she became a whistleblower when she filed a scientific integrity complaint that the agency dismissed before putting her on leave in January 2020 and then firing her for alleged lapses in her research – a termination that was later retracted.

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Science
H. Holden Thorp

In recent years, the research community has become increasingly concerned with issues involving the manipulation of images in scientific papers. Some of these alterations—involving images from experimental techniques such as microscopy, flow cytometry, and western blots—are inadvertent and may not change the conclusions of papers. But in rare cases, some are done deliberately to mislead readers. Image sleuths who can detect these alterations, like the scientific integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik, have risen to prominence, as has the website PubPeer, where many of the detected flaws are posted. High-profile incidents, such as one involving the laboratory of former Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, have eroded public confidence in science and harmed careers of investigators who missed doctored images coming from their own laboratories. To address these problems, in 2024, the Science family of journals is adopting the use of Proofig, an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered image-analysis tool, to detect altered images across all six of the journals.

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