PLOS One has retracted a 2011 paper first flagged for image issues 11 years ago. The retraction marks the fourth for the paper’s lead author, Gabriella Marfè of the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli,” in Caserta, Italy.
Elisabeth Bik flagged the article on PubPeer in 2014 for apparent image manipulation and duplication in six figures. In a 2019 email to PLOS staff, pseudonymous sleuth Claire Francis drew attention to Bik’s findings. The journal retracted the paper on May 6 of this year.
For years, sleuths – whose names our readers are likely familiar with – have been diligently flagging issues with the scientific literature. More than a dozen of these specialists have teamed up to create a set of guides to teach others their trade.
The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG) aims to make “post-publication peer review” more accessible, according to the preprint made available online today. The 25 guides so far range from general – “PubPeer commenting best practices” – to field-specific – like spotting issues with X-ray diffraction patterns.
Although 15 sleuths are named as contributors on the project, those we talked to emphasized the project should be largely credited to Reese Richardson, the author of the preprint.
A researcher who retracted two papers last year following a years-long investigation has lost another, this one two decades old.
The same journal also corrected two papers for image duplication within days of the retraction.
The moves followed comments about image similarities on PubPeer. The retraction marks the third for biochemist Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Two of his papers were retracted in 2024, a process that took six years and included a four-year investigation by the university.
A former Baylor College of Medicine researcher has been debarred from federal funding for two years after a review by the Office of Research Integrity found evidence of misconduct.
Liping Zhang, a former assistant professor in the school’s nephrology section, “engaged in research misconduct in research supported by U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) funds,” according to a notice scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on March 19.
ORI based its findings on a Baylor College of Medicine investigation as well as evidence gathered during its oversight review, the notice states. It continues:
In 2018, a biochemist in Scotland became aware of image irregularities in two of his papers through comments on PubPeer, each in a different journal. The researcher, Dario Alessi, a professor at the University of Dundee, said he alerted his home institution immediately.
In July and October 2024, the papers were retracted.
Emailsobtained by Retraction Watch through a public records request show what happened in the intervening six years: Consecutive investigations by Dundee and a funder, then delays as the journals juggled conflicting narratives. In the meantime, the papers continued racking up citations.
Two Dutch researchers were preparing a review of preclinical animal models for hemorrhagic stroke last July when they stumbled across a disturbing pattern in the literature.
First, they found many more papers on the topic than the 50 or so they expected based on their experience: more than 600.
Also, nearly every study proposed a different intervention, which was “very unusual,” said René Aquarius, a neurosurgery researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “Why would you show a very beneficial effect and then say, ‘let’s do something else?’”
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.
In an episode reminiscent of the AI-generated graphic of a rat with a giant penis, another paper with an anatomically incorrect image has been retracted after it attracted attention on social media. The authors admit using ChatGPT to make the diagram.
According to the retraction notice published July 12, the article, by researchers at Guangdong Provincial Hydroelectric Hospital in Guangzhou, China, was retracted after “concerns were raised over the integrity of the data and an inaccurate figure.”
The paper, published in Lippincott’s Medicine, purported to describe a randomized controlled trial that found alkaline water could reduce pain and alleviate symptoms of chronic gouty arthritis.
A university vice president has received his first retraction – and disagrees with it, according to the journal.
The retraction for Jaydutt Vadgama, the Vice President for Research and Health Affairs at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, comes after a commenter on PubPeer noted similarities between data in two papers from the same group. Similar comments have led to corrections to two other papers by Vadgama, who is also professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles.
In the autumn of 2022, a researcher in Turkey was reviewing a paper for a cardiology journal when an image of a Western blot caught her eye: A hardly visible pair of “unusual” lighter pixels seemed out of place. Magnification only bolstered her suspicion that something was off.
“This image made me think that the bands were cut one by one and pasted on a membrane background,” Şenay Akin, of Hacettepe University in Ankara, wrote in her comments to the editor of Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy, a Springer Nature journal. “If this is the case, it indicates a manipulation [of] the results of this study.”
The editor, Yochai Birnbaum of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, made a note to check the figure, adding below Akin’s comments in the editorial-management system: “I agree with the reviewer. It could be that the I/R band was manipulated.”
