Science Integrity Digest
Elisabeth Bik has become an unexpected lightning rod. In 2013 she heard about science paper plagiarism and, on a whim, took a sentence she wrote in a paper and put it into Google Scholar to see if anybody had used the text. She found the sentence picked randomly had indeed been stolen by somebody else. The paper plagiarized not only her text but that of many others.
Fast forward to one evening in January 2014. She sat at her computer, sifting through scientific papers as she often did. Imagine her shock when she saw a section of the same photo being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments. The authors seemed to be deliberately trying to cover their tracks by flipping the image back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped differently.
What came next was the discovery of a shocking amount of very obviously duplicated and fabricated images. In a simple scan, she found 800 of 20,000 papers to contain duplicated figures and they estimated about half of the duplications were deliberate. What’s worse, a shocking 2% of all papers she looked at had deliberately copied and manipulated images/figures – indicating clear intent to hide the deception.
Unpaid and unfunded, she now publishes her findings on a blog that’s caused a lot of angry responses from the scientific community – despite the fact she’s uncovering clearly evident, and embarrassingly incompetent cases of fraud. Fraud that has resulted in a shocking number of retractions – from some of the most the world’s most accredited institutions and researchers.
The cases she’s found are incredibly easy to spot – which implies that there’s probably a lot more sophisticated fraud ready to be discovered.
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