Using just her eyes and memory, Elisabeth Bik has single-handedly identified thousands of studies containing potentially doctored scientific images. I

How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-23 12:00:04

Using just her eyes and memory, Elisabeth Bik has single-handedly identified thousands of studies containing potentially doctored scientific images.

In June of 2013, Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist, grew curious about the subject of plagiarism. She had read that scientific dishonesty was a growing problem, and she idly wondered if her work might have been stolen by others. One day, she pasted a sentence from one of her scientific papers into the Google Scholar search engine. She found that several of her sentences had been copied, without permission, in an obscure online book. She pasted a few more sentences from the same book chapter into the search box, and discovered that some of them had been purloined from other scientists’ writings.

Bik has a methodical, thorough disposition, and she analyzed the chapter over the weekend. She found that it contained text plagiarized from eighteen uncredited sources, which she categorized using color-coded highlighting. Searching out plagiarism became a kind of hobby for Bik; she began trawling Google Scholar for more cases in her off-hours, when she wasn’t working as a researcher at Stanford. She soon identified thirty faked biomedical papers, some in well-respected journals. She e-mailed the publications’ editors, and, within a few months, some of the articles were retracted.

In January, 2014, Bik was scrolling through a suspicious dissertation when she began glancing at the images, too. They included photographs known as Western blots, in which proteins appear as dark bands. Bik thought that she’d seen one particular protein band before—it had a fat little black dot at one end. Elsewhere in the dissertation, she found the same band flipped around and presented as if it were data from a different experiment. She kept looking, and spotted a dozen more Western blots that looked copied or subtly doctored. She learned that the thesis, written by a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, had been published as two journal articles in 2010.