![]() Hunting for and cataloguing these images became a hobby. After an investigation by Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, the articles were retracted in 20. These were Bik’s first reports of suspected manipulation in the literature. She e-mailed journal editors in January 2014 in June, she anonymously reported the papers online at PubPeer, a website where scientists can discuss published papers. The chapters had also appeared as research articles, with the same errors, Bik saw. The same image appeared in another chapter, supposedly for a different experiment. “I immediately got fascinated about it, like how other people get fascinated by reading about crimes.” At one point, while examining a PhD thesis containing plagiarized text, something even more compelling caught her eye: a western-blot image with a distinctive smudge. Out of curiosity, she googled quotes from her own published papers, and quickly found that other authors had lifted text without giving credit. Hooked by a double smudgeīik stumbled into image sleuthing around 2013, when, as a staff scientist at Stanford University in California, she read articles about scientific integrity and plagiarism. ![]() “I’m enjoying it so much that I feel I just want to keep on doing this,” she says. She’s also shared her files with computer scientists trying to develop software to spot duplicated images across millions of papers, although the programs will probably always need human verification. A year on, she shows no signs of changing course - even though she has faced harassment, and at times been overwhelmed with requests. In April 2019, Bik announced that she had left her paid job at a biomedical start-up firm and would pursue image integrity work full-time, free of charge, for at least a year. Bik estimates that her discoveries have led to at least 172 retractions and more than 300 errata and corrections - but all too often, she says, her warnings seem to be ignored. In so doing, she’s generated an “avalanche of reactions” and awareness about the problem, says Bucci. ![]() But Bik posts her finds almost every day on Twitter and other online forums, in the process teaching others how to spot duplications and pressuring journals to investigate papers. Some who flag up image problems work under pseudonyms, preferring not to be identified. Many image checkers work behind the scenes, publishing their findings in research papers and writing privately to journals a few are hired by journals or institutions. “You have postdocs and students wasting months or years chasing things which turn out to not be valid,” he says.īik is not the world’s only image sleuth, but she is unique in how publicly she presents her work. “It’s a terrible problem that we can’t rely on some aspects of the scientific literature,” says Ferric Fang, a microbiologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who worked on a study with Bik in which she analysed more than 20,000 biomedical papers, finding problematic duplications in roughly 4% of them ( E. But some do, which causes deep concern for many researchers. Not every issue means a paper is fraudulent or wrong. “She has an uncommon ability to detect even the most complicated manipulation,” says Enrico Bucci, co-founder of the research-integrity firm Resis in Samone, Italy. ![]() Her skill and doggedness have earned her a worldwide following. On a typical day, she’ll scan dozens of biomedical papers by eye, looking for instances in which images are reused and reported as results from different experiments, or where parts of images are cloned, flipped, shifted or rotated to create ‘new’ data (see ‘Are you a super-spotter?’). The writer wants to know: does Bik see anything fishy in this paper? Have these pictures been digitally altered?īik, a microbiologist from the Netherlands who moved to the United States almost two decades ago, is a widely lauded super-spotter of duplicated images in the scientific literature. Attached are images of western blots - the results of a common test to detect proteins in biological samples - from a published research paper. She checks her e-mails on a giant 34-inch curved monitor, and takes a closer look at the Belgian message. Today’s first request is from a researcher in Belgium: “Hi! I know you have a lot of people asking you to use your magic powers to analyse figures, blots and others but I just wanted to ask your opinion…”Īfter pouring a cup of coffee, Bik sits down at the long, wooden dining table that serves as her workstation at her home in California. February the fourteenth starts like most other days for Elisabeth Bik: checking her phone in bed, she scrolls through a slew of Twitter notifications and private messages from scientists seeking her detective services.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |