Elisabeth Bik: The Dark Side of Science – Misconduct in Biomedical Research

Seminar on scientific misconduct and data manipulation in biomedical research. The seminar is held in English and is open to the public. Please register via email.

Registration: furqan.ali.shah@biomaterials.gu.se.

Elisabeth Bik, PhD is a Dutch-American microbiologist who has worked for 15 years at Stanford University and 2 years in industry. Since 2019, she is a science integrity volunteer and consultant who scans the biomedical literature for images or other data of concern and has reported over 6,000 scientific papers. Her work has resulted in over 900 retracted and another 900 corrected papers. For her work on exposing threats to research integrity, she received the 2021 John Maddox Prize.

Science builds upon science. Even after peer-review and publication, science papers could still contain images or other data of concern. If not addressed post-publication, papers containing incorrect or even falsified data could lead to wasted time and money spent by other researchers trying to reproduce those results. Several high-profile science misconduct cases have been described, but many more cases remain undetected. Elisabeth Bik is an image forensics detective who left her paid job in industry to search for and report biomedical articles that contain errors or data of concern. She has done a systematic scan of 20,000 papers in 40 journals and found that about 4% of these contained inappropriately duplicated images. In her talk, she will present her work and show several types of inappropriately duplicated images and other examples of research misconduct. In addition, she will show how to report scientific papers of concern, and how journals and institutions handle such allegations.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01363-z
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Bik