Up to 35,000 scientific articles may contain image manipulations serious enough to warrant retraction, according to a preprint posted to bioRxiv earlier this week (June 24). The estimate was based on an extrapolation from a thorough analysis of 960 articles published in the American Society of Microbiology’s Molecular and Cellular Biology, which revealed inappropriately duplicated images in around 6 percent—a rate that the authors suggest could be lowered by better image screening procedures at journals before publication.
“The frequent occurrence of inappropriate image duplication in published papers is a major concern, because it reduces the integrity and credibility of the biomedical literature,” the authors write in their paper. “In the present study, we sought to determine whether an investment by a journal to scan images in accepted manuscripts prior to publication could resolve image concerns in less time than was required to address these issues after publication.”
Study coauthor Elisabeth ...
