Weatherman2020
Diamond Member
Oh sorry. Unlike in my early days, peer review is not required anymore.
So put your faith in science!
Online sleuths have discovered what they suspect is a paper mill that has produced more than 400 scientific papers with potentially fabricated images. Some journals are now investigating the papers.
Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist–turned–research integrity expert based in San Francisco, along with other “forensic detectives,” identified the potentially problematic papers, which they think came from a single source. They say the papers contain western blot images—used in molecular biology to visualize the presence of proteins—that contain remarkably similar background patterns and unusually neat bands lacking smears, stains, or dots, which often appear in such images.
“We think that these western blots are not real,” says Bik, who wrote about the case on her blog on 21 February. “Most of them have a very similar layout so we realized these are all coming from the same stable.”
A single ‘paper mill’ appears to have churned out 400 papers, sleuths find | Science | AAAS
So put your faith in science!
Online sleuths have discovered what they suspect is a paper mill that has produced more than 400 scientific papers with potentially fabricated images. Some journals are now investigating the papers.
Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist–turned–research integrity expert based in San Francisco, along with other “forensic detectives,” identified the potentially problematic papers, which they think came from a single source. They say the papers contain western blot images—used in molecular biology to visualize the presence of proteins—that contain remarkably similar background patterns and unusually neat bands lacking smears, stains, or dots, which often appear in such images.
“We think that these western blots are not real,” says Bik, who wrote about the case on her blog on 21 February. “Most of them have a very similar layout so we realized these are all coming from the same stable.”
A single ‘paper mill’ appears to have churned out 400 papers, sleuths find | Science | AAAS