Photographic images, in particular, aren’t illustrations but the evidence itself. In science, images are profoundly important: every picture and graph in a scientific paper is meant to represent data supporting the authors’ findings. But it can be a sign that something is amiss. The presence of a flawed image in a scientific study doesn’t necessarily invalidate its central observations. She learned that the thesis, written by a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University, had been published as two journal articles in 2010. She kept looking, and spotted a dozen more Western blots that looked copied or subtly doctored. Elsewhere in the dissertation, she found the same band flipped around and presented as if it were data from a different experiment. Bik thought that she’d seen one particular protein band before-it had a fat little black dot at one end. They included photographs known as Western blots, in which proteins appear as dark bands. In January, 2014, Bik was scrolling through a suspicious dissertation when she began glancing at the images, too. She e-mailed the publications’ editors, and, within a few months, some of the articles were retracted. She soon identified thirty faked biomedical papers, some in well-respected journals. 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 found that it contained text plagiarized from eighteen uncredited sources, which she categorized using color-coded highlighting. 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.īik has a methodical, thorough disposition, and she analyzed the chapter over the weekend. She found that several of her sentences had been copied, without permission, in an obscure online book. One day, she pasted a sentence from one of her scientific papers into the Google Scholar search engine. She had read that scientific dishonesty was a growing problem, and she idly wondered if her work might have been stolen by others. In June of 2013, Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist, grew curious about the subject of plagiarism.
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