A blog about science integrity, by Elisabeth Bik, for Harbers-Bik LLC. Support my work at Patreon.com/elisabethbik
On Twitter/X, @SciGuardians, associated with the website ScienceGuardians.com, is promising to ‘uncover’ some big conspiracy of fraudulent @pubpeer.com users.
But in reality, the account appears to be run by one or more disgruntled scientists with dozens of problematic papers. And there is no big reveal.
Apologies for not posting for a while. Fall 2024 was a busy time for me, with travel to give talks in Australia and Singapore and some events in the US. Instead of trying to catch up with everything that has happened since September, here are some highlights.
I’m thrilled to have won the 2024 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. The Einstein Foundation Berlin selects three winners each year. The 2024 winners are:
The award ceremony will take place in March 2025 in Berlin, Germany.
Instead of accepting the Einstein Foundation award money for myself, I’ve decided to put it into ‘The Elisabeth Bik Science Integrity Fund’ – where I hope to help other science sleuths with small grants for e.g., traveling to conferences, buying equipment or software, or training. Our type of work often does not fit into the hypothesis-driven model of government or charity funds, so I hope to help by filling this funding gap.
The Bik Fund will be part of The Center For Scientific Integrity, Retraction Watch’s parent 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
It is my hope that we can make this fund grow, so we can help more integrity warriors in the future – donations to the Bik fund are tax-deductible and very welcome.
Press coverage:
Charles Piller’s new book ‘Doctored – Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s’ came out earlier this month.
The book describes how Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University and a fellow image-sleuth, discovered possibly altered images in a highly-cited paper about amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients and in other papers connected to the biotech company Cassava Sciences (see also below). It also gives a disturbing insight into the amount of fraud in neuroscience and the lack of action by journals, institutions, and government agencies.
Matthew Schrag and other ‘science sleuths’—Kevin Patrick, Mu Yang, and I—worked for two years checking thousands of papers in Alzheimer’s research and related fields for the book, uncovering a concerning number of potential problems in papers by Sylvain Lesné, Berislav Zlokovic, Eliezer Masliah, and others.
Press coverage of Piller’s book:
Podcasts with Charles Piller and/or Matthew Schrag (there are many more!)
I have written in the past (here and here) about problematic images in papers by Dr. Hoau-Yan Wang and Cassava Sciences (NASDAQ: $SAVA), a biotech company testing a drug targeting Alzheimer’s disease. These concerns were first spotted by Matthew Schrag and published in a Citizen Petition, in an attempt to halt Cassava’s clinical trials. Despite the apparent problems, the FDA did not stop Cassava’s clinical trials of their Alzheimer’s drug, Simufilam. But Cassava’s stock dropped significantly, upsetting a lot of investors.
For three years, fans of the $SAVA stock harassed the Dr. Wang critics – including me – claiming that the drug would work fine; that all stockholders would be rich as long as they would HODL; and that all our concerns were FUD. They joined forces in a SAVAges Discord app, where they talked about how one day they would all buy Maseratis, Lamborghinis, and even a SAVA island — and how retarded and fraudulent the SAVA-critics were.
The authorities begged to differ, however. In March 2024, Science reported that FDA inspectors had found many problems in Dr. Wang’s lab, ranging from uncalibrated instruments, lack of control samples, and stored data files, to leaving out outliers based on subjective criteria. Another report by the City University of New York (CUNY) to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), leaked to Science, described ‘egregious misconduct’ in Dr. Wang’s lab. In June last year the Department of Justice announced that Professor Wang had been charged with operating a ‘Multimillion-Dollar Grant Fraud Scheme’.
Meanwhile, lawsuits were filed back-and-forth. Cassava Sciences was suing the people who filed the FDA citizen petition and who set up the website CassavaFraud.com, while stockholders were suing Cassava in a class-action lawsuit for misrepresenting the quality of the experiments performed by Dr. Wang. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Cassava with misrepresenting clinical trials result, and later settled for $40M. And CUNY, instead of officially announcing their misconduct findings, was investigating who leaked their misconduct investigation report to Science.
Finally, last December the biotech company announced that the Phase 3 trial did not meet the anticipated endpoints. In other words, Simufilam did not halt or improve Alzheimer’s disease. The Cassava Sciences stock immediately dropped to $2-3 dollars, and the SAVAges Discord became a valley of despair. No more SAVA island.
As I’ve written previously, many papers from Professor Didier Raoult, the former director of the IHU Méditerranée Infection in Marseille, France, are problematic.
Some appear to contain manipulated images, while others describe research conducted without proper ethical permits. A number of Raoult’s studies were performed on vulnerable populations, such as homeless people, or on study participants in the Global South, which I [gasp!] dared to label neocolonial science.
As described in this paper by Fabrice Frank et al, the IHU-MI produced a set of 248 studies all with the same IRB approval number, 09–022. Despite sharing the same permit, the publications varied in terms of sample type, demographics, and countries. Other ‘multi-use’ IRB numbers were found too. Typically, an IRB approves one particular study, and researchers are not allowed to reuse this permit for other, unrelated, studies. Dr. Raoult appears to have cared little for such rules, however.
After raising our concerns on PubPeer and social media, and also writing to journal editors, several journals have started to issue Expressions of Concern and retractions.
Fabrice Frank has generated a list of all IHU-MI papers with concerns – there are over 800!
In fact, Raoult has now earned so many retractions (32 as of today) that he has entered the Retraction Watch Leaderboard. The most significant of them is the retraction of the paper that claimed that Hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID-19. I criticized this paper in my blog post in April 2020, days after its publication. It took more than four years to get it retracted.
With over 600 of his papers on PubPeer and 225 EoCs, it seems safe to assume that for Raoult’s position on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard list, the only way is up.
An overview of general news and articles about science integrity and some cases that I have worked on.
The US Office of Research Integrity updated its regulations on handling research misconduct allegations. Key updates include clarifying the inquiry process and adjusting how institutions should handle the allegations and record the process.
James Heathers published a preprint arguing that the old, often-cited number that 2% of papers are fake is outdated and a vast underestimate. In a new preprint, he argues it might be 1 in 7 papers, based on 12 studies that together analyze 75,000 scientific articles.
Your monthly digest of science integrity news.
A round-up from July, with news articles about science integrity, retractions, sleuthing, artificial intelligence, and more.
Continue reading “Science Integrity Digest, July 2024”A round-up from last month, with news articles about science integrity, retractions of several highly cited papers in the fields of Alzheimer’s disease and stem cell research, generative AI and misconduct, and another retraction for Didier Raoult.
About 17 years after New Scientist investigators Eugenie Reich and Peter Aldhous revealed problems in a Nature 2002 paper about making adult stem cells pluripotent (see 2007 articles in New Scientist and New York Times and this recent X thread here), and more than four years after I found additional problems in that paper (PubPeer), Nature decided to retract it. Meanwhile, it has been cited nearly 4,500 times.
The International Journal of Obesity retracted an article on which Didier Raoult was the corresponding and last author, “because the authors could not confirm approval from an appropriate ethics committee to recruit healthy donors to provide samples for use in this research.”According to the Retraction Watch Database, this is his 13th retraction. The paper had been flagged on PubPeer because it was one of five papers with the same local approval number, while it appeared to not have CPP approval (regional IRB-like approval needed in France for human subjects research). Read more about the problems in Raoult’s papers here, here, and here.
A (now-retracted) paper featuring an AI-generated rat with a giant penis has caused a lot of laughs on social media. But AI is capable of making much more believable images. Is the scientific publishing world ready for a tsunami of fake photos and dataset? And how can we use AI tools to actually detect fraud? Also see below in the new publication list.
A digest of last month’s news articles, retractions, and scientific publications about science integrity and misconduct. Some articles might be behind a paywall. Let me know in the comments if I missed something!
Continue reading “Science Integrity Digest, May 2024”A review article with some obviously fake and non-scientific illustrations created by Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the talk on X (Twitter) today.
The figures in the paper were generated by the AI tool Midjourney, which generated some pretty, but nonsensical, illustrations with unreadable text.
It appears that neither the editor nor the two peer reviewers looked at the figures at all. The paper was peer-reviewed within a couple of weeks and published two days ago.
Dear readers, today I present you: the rat with the enormous family jewels and the diƨlocttal stem ells.
Over the last week I’ve been analyzing a set of papers from a research group at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which falls under the Harvard Medical School. The papers have the usual image problems we unfortunately encounter so often, such as duplicated photos of mice and overlapping Western blots.
But this set also includes a 2022 paper that appears to have copied/pasted several figure panels from other researchers and even from scientific vendors. Most of these problems were found with ImageTwin or reverse image searches.
Quick links [the spreadsheet and slide have been updated with an additional problem found on Feb 2, 2024]:
Here is a summary of some recent news articles about problematic science papers and the tools used to detect them.
The main science integrity story in the past month concerned a set of ~50 papers from four research groups at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) found by molecular biologist Sholto David from Wales. He first blogged about the set on January 2nd in a guest post on Leonid Schneider’s For Better Science site. Using ImageTwin to scan scientific articles, he discovered image duplication problems in about 30 of these papers. His blog post also included issues with papers from the same researchers, previously flagged by other (anonymous) image sleuths on PubPeer.
This story was then reported by Veronica H. Paulus and Akshaya Ravi of the Harvard Crimson, a student-run newspaper, on January 12. A week later, Angus Chen and Jonathan Wosen reported on the case at STAT News.
Typically with such allegations, the institutions issue a standard reply saying they take breaches of scientific integrity very seriously, and that they will investigate – followed by months or years of silence. But this case was different. On January 22, just three weeks after David’s blog post came out, DFCI responded that they had already investigated most of the cases reported by David, and said that 6 papers would be retracted, and another 31 corrected.
Some other coverage of this story:
Related to the DFCI story above, several interviews focusing on the work and motivation of Sholto David have been published. Similar to the way in which many other science image-forensics detectives — including myself — work, Dr. David uses both his eyes and software (ImageTwin) to scan scientific papers for image problems. Here are some of the recent profiles:
At the beginning of this month Dr. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University, resigned from her position after receiving criticism for how she and two other top-university presidents handled a Congress hearing about antisemitism on campus, and also for allegations of plagiarism in her PhD thesis. Most criticisms came from conservative people and news sites, turning plagiarism allegations into a political weapon against ‘wokism’ with undertones of racism (Dr. Gay is Black).
Having said that, the plagiarism allegations were credible and real. And it seems fair to have the same standards for university presidents and professors as universities expect students to adhere to.
Business Insider then reported on a similar case of plagiarism in the Harvard dissertation of designer and artist Dr. Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire Bill Ackman, who was one of the critics of Dr. Gay’s position. Ackman responded on X with some very long tweets basically arguing that the plagiarism of his wife was ‘good plagiarism’ and that of Dr. Gay ‘bad plagiarism’, without convincing me that there was any difference. Ackman was even threatening to sue Business Insider, adding to the emerging picture that science misconduct cases may no longer be investigated based on legitimate allegations of misconduct, but might instead be dismissed by rich people who can afford expensive lawyers to dismiss such allegations because of ‘defamation’. A worrying development that will not serve scientific integrity.
This week, Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Sherri A. Charleston was also accused of plagiarism in her PhD thesis.
Additional coverage of this story:
Science Integrity Digest