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.
Richard Eckert, formerly the chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and deputy director of the university’s Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center, faked data in 13 published papers and two grant applications, ORI found.
The ORI finding stated Eckert “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by” every NIH grant on which he served as principal investigator, totaling more than $19 million. The finding also lists multiple “Center Core Grants” worth hundreds of millions for shared resources and facilities at research centers.
Two decades later, much has changed. I am reassured by the heightened awareness of this issue and the numerous efforts to address it by various stakeholders in the publication process, but I am disappointed that image manipulation remains such an extensive problem in the biomedical literature. (Note: I use the term “image manipulation” throughout this piece as a generic term to refer to both image manipulation (e.g., copy/paste, erasure, splicing, etc.) and image duplication.)
In 2002, I was the managing editor of The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB), and STM journals were transitioning away from paper submissions. We had just implemented online manuscript submission, and authors often sent figure files in the wrong file format. One day, I assisted an author by reformatting some figure files. In one of the Western blot image panels, I noticed sharp lines around some of the bands, indicating they had either been copied and pasted into the image or the intensity of those bands had been selectively altered.
Mike Rossner
I vividly recall my reaction, which was, “Oh shit, this is going to be a problem. We’re going to have to do something about this.” With the blessing of then editor-in-chief, Ira Mellman, I immediately instituted a policy for the journal to examine all figure files of all accepted manuscripts for evidence of manipulation before they could be published. We began using simple techniques, which I developed along with three of my colleagues at the time, Rob O’Donnell, Erinn Grady, and Laura Smith. The approach involved visual inspection of each image panel using adjustments of brightness and contrast in Photoshop, to enhance visualization of background elements.
On a Friday in July, Laura Schaefer Googled herself to find her ORCID researcher ID for a paper submission.
To her surprise, a paper popped up with her name in a journal she’d never published in. Her surprise quickly turned to concern – had someone copied one of her articles?
As she searched the site where the work appeared, she found more articles with her name, covering subjects she had never written about and with co-authors she didn’t know.
“[I] became angrier the more I found, and also started feeling really violated that someone had used my name and title to put forward something that wasn’t scientifically rigorous,” Schaefer, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rice University in Houston, said.
In 2008, a group of researchers published a paper in Current Biology reporting on what they said was a lungless water-loving frog in Borneo.
According to David Bickford, then of the National University of Singapore, and his colleagues, the Bornean flat-headed frog “breathed” the way most salamanders do: by absorbing oxygen through their skin or, during earlier phases of life for some species, through gills. (We’re not salamander experts, so if this characterization is a bit crude, don’t come for us.) Because the frog lived in fast-moving streams, the researchers reasoned, it could obtain adequate oxygen to meet its needs.
For the last 15-odd years, that understanding held. But in May, another team of herpetologists, using more sophisticated tools, said they’ve found evidence of lungs – tiny but functional – in the creatures. As the New Scientist magazine reported earlier this year:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has corrected an article by a prize-winning chemist following a report by Retraction Watch his threat to sue a fellow scientist who had submitted a letter to the journal critiquing the paper.
Chad Mirkin, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in Chicago, received one quarter of this year’s Kavli Prize in nanoscience for his work on spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), the topic of the PNAS article.
As we reported last month, a lawyer representing Mirkin sent a cease and desist letter to Raphaël Lévy, a professor of physics at the Université Paris Sorbonne Nord, accusing Lévy of making “patently false and defamatory” statements about Mirkin’s research in a letter Lévy had submitted to PNAS about the now-corrected article.
In his letter, Lévy wrote that the article’s “presentation of SNAs as a ‘powerful class of nanotherapeutics’ is misleading.”
A journal has republished an edited version of a paper it retracted after a distributor of a chiropractic product the paper criticized wrote in to complain.
The distributor accused the publication of making “very serious, incorrect and libelous statements” and threatened legal action, Retraction Watch has learned.
An article about the overuse of spinal imaging has been retracted after the distributor of a chiropractic product it criticized in passing complained to the journal.
Denneroll is a line of support products that purports to help with “spinal remodeling” for people whose spines aren’t curved in the normal way, according to a company brochure. The company’s website states that the Denneroll products are “second to none in spinal orthotics.”
The retraction notice said Deed Harrison, a chiropractor whose family distributes the Denneroll product line, “claimed that the data presented against this product lacks scientific backing.” Harrison’s father, Donald Harrison, originated a technique called Chiropractic BioPhysics (CBP) which is the basis of the Denneroll product line, according to the CBP website.
In November 2013, Elisabeth Bik reported five papers containing what she thought was “pretty obvious” plagiarized text in Karger’s Digestive Diseases to the journal’s editor in chief.
The decision took “a ridiculously long time,” Bik said. “Perhaps they forgot to act, perhaps they lost my email, perhaps they thought it was too much trouble to check, or perhaps they were not sure what to do back in 2013, when I contacted them.”
What do fairytales and scientific papers have in common? Consider the story of Rumpelstiltskin.
A poor miller tries to impress the king by claiming his daughter can spin straw into gold. The avaricious king locks up the girl and tells her to spin out the gold. She fails, until a goblin, Rumpelstiltskin, comes to her rescue.
In science, publishers and editors of academic journals prefer to publish demonstrably new findings – gold – rather than replications or refutations of findings which have been published already. This “novelty pressure” requires presentation of results that are “significant” – usually that includes being “statistically significant.”
A political scientist in Canada copied his postdoc’s work without credit in a paper, according to the retraction notice and a university inquiry report.
The paper by Charles Conteh, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, appeared in Sage’s Outlook on Agriculture in October 2023. It has one citation, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
An inquiry by Brock identified plagiarism and uncredited authorship in the article, according to the report finalized this March and seen by Retraction Watch. Failure to give post-doctoral fellows the “opportunity to publish in peer-reviewed journals negatively impacts [them] both reputationally and financially,” the report states.
