A space scientist formerly based at the University of Sydney made up data in an unpublished manuscript, an investigation by the institution has found.
The researcher, Joachim Schmidt, “utilised Adobe Photoshop to make up results,” according to a letter dated Feb. 15, 2023, from Emma Johnston, deputy vice-chancellor of research at the University of Sydney, to scientists at the University of Michigan who reported complaints in late 2019 about work by Schmidt and his former professor Iver Cairns to the Australian institution.
“Given the above, the Panel found there had been breaches of the Research Code on the part of Dr Schmidt. The breaches were viewed as serious, and the Panel considered them to be sufficiently serious to warrant a finding of research misconduct as defined in the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research,” the letter, obtained by Retraction Watch, stated.
The fabricated image appears in a manuscript about the effects of weather in space Schmidt wrote with Cairns. The paper has yet to be published.
Sydney has also launched a probe into all the images published in papers Schmidt co-authored in the last five years, according to the letter.
In November 2020, Sydney was named the Academic Institution of the Year at the Australian Space Awards, and Cairns was one of the scientists who accepted the award. According to his LinkedIn page, Schmidt was a lecturer at Sydney’s School of Physics from November 2010 to March 2021.
Schmidt could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for Sydney told Retraction Watch that Schmidt had not been dismissed from the university; instead, he left the institution after his fixed-term contract expired.
Gábor Toth, one of the scientists at the University of Michigan whose model Schmidt used, noticed the fishy image in the manuscript when Cairns emailed it to him and asked if he wanted to be a co-author.
According to a redacted version of a Jan. 2023 report on the case obtained by Retraction Watch, the investigation panel determined that Schmidt used Photoshop “to alter or create” a figure in the 2019 manuscript that was purported to be the output of Toth’s model. Neither Schmidt nor digital forensics experts could reproduce the image with the model.
The panel concluded that Schmidt alone produced the Photoshopped figure.
“At interview, Professor Cairns explained that he has no experience with Photoshop, confirmed that he did not make any amendments, and could not recall asking Dr Schmidt to make any adjustments using Photoshop,” the report stated. It noted that the creation or alteration of the figure “amounted to fabrication and falsification on the part of Dr Schmidt.”
“The cheating is so obvious that it can be understood by anyone, no scientific knowledge is needed,” Toth told Retraction Watch.
Richard de Grijs, a physicist at MacQuarie University in Australia, and Rob Wittenmyer, an astrophysicist at the University of South Queensland, who carried out the investigation, wrote in the report that if one were to accept Schmidt’s claim that he used Photoshop to make the internal structures of the image brighter and more visible, there would need to be an explanatory note in the paper.
“This should have been done at the draft stage so that Professor Cairns and other prospective authors were made aware of the adjustments for the purposes of their consideration of the draft paper,” they wrote.
The report exonerated Cairns of any wrongdoing, noting that he had no involvement in producing the figure in question and wasn’t aware that Schmidt had fabricated and falsified the image.
But Toth isn’t satisfied. He said Cairns deserves some blame and that clearing him of wrongdoing is “completely irresponsible”.
Cairns declined to comment, citing confidentiality agreements. Wittenmyer and de Grijs also declined to comment on their report, citing confidentiality.
Toth has claimed nobody in the community believes the results described in Schmidt and Cairns’ other papers.
In a rebuttal he published on another of Schmidt and Cairns’ preprints last month, Toth wrote the results were so outlandish they had “only one reasonable explanation”: that they “were most likely not obtained by reproducible numerical simulations.” Previous papers by the duo using the same technique are “similarly questionable,” Toth wrote.
“It also seems likely that several published papers with questionable content have slipped through the peer review process,” Toth continued. “Readers and reviewers who only rely on the manuscript and published papers may or may not be able to distinguish genuine science from the type of content presented by [Schmidt and Cairns].”
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Una investigación a ese nivel y cuyos resultados alterados, solo contribuye a la falta de ética académica por la manipulación de datos de otras investigaciones y asumirlas como suyas.
Es menester reflexionar y poner en práctica la ética profesional en el actuar como estudiante y a futuro como profesional del doctorado.
Nifty to hear about photoshop allegations well beyond Bio research, and being unpublished nothing in PubPeer. I would love to learn the intrinsics as to how one might recognize a questioned image in astronomy?
Well, I guess if you see the Big Dipper…twice! That would be a give-away.
Of course, but do we know that is what happened? Can RW elaborate?
It sounds like the the authors claim to have produced an image with computer simulations, but the people who wrote the program that was used don’t believe them. Instead, opposite to what usually happens with doctored images, it appears that a (modified version of a) true observation was used. That’s one way to make your simulations look impressive.
If you look at page 14 and page 19 of the redacted report (see the link above), you can see the images and decide for yourself if the fabrication is obvious.
“The report exonerated Cairns of any wrongdoing, noting that he had no involvement in producing the figure in question and wasn’t aware that Schmidt had fabricated and falsified the image. ”
How very nice. Cairns is simply allowed to deny any wrongdoing while Schmidt is held accountable for the “fabricated and falsified image”. Once might be believable. But if this occurred in multiple papers that Cairns put his name to then he should be held accountable for it just as Schmidt was held accountable.
And did anyone else find it odd that neither the University of Sydney Research Code of Conduct (2013, 2019) or the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2018) apparently never actually defined what “falsification” and “fabrication” actually is? And that the investigators actually had to go to an outside source to find suitable definitions for each? Seems like a major deficiency in a Code of Conduct to me.
I don’t know about Photoshop, but that looks very much like what Adobe Illustrator would output if you took the original image and ran “trace bitmap” on it.
Which probe data is not fabricated?
Space scientist makes up data… University launches a probe. Well played RW!