Reese Richardson
@reeserichardson
I am a recent PhD studying metascience and computational biology. My blog:
Oriental fire-bellied toad. Not a true toad, this frog species sports small tubercules on its dorsal side and a vibrant red or yellow pattern on their ventral side. When threatened, they exhibit the unken reflex, where they curl their limbs backward to display this pattern as a warning.
Another example just identified by @bryanheit.bsky.social ! My annotation:
Here's one egregious example of painting spotted by @elisabethbik.bsky.social : www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...
A member of the community also noticed an instance where Thermo Fisher had apparently removed manipulated images from an antibody's catalog page *after* we made our initial observations of apparent manipulation (with no public notice).
Many of the problematic Western blots don't just share the same background, but feature the exact same band shape.
The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)
Thermo Fisher has now made public the company line, which is ?!??!?!??!?!?! you really gotta read it. cen.acs.org/research-int...
It quickly became clear that the problem is much more widespread than original anticipated. We've identified dozens of instances of duplicated blots, "painting" in Photoshop and even dozens (probably hundreds) of images that all use the same background with different bands superimposed over.
@johanduchene.bsky.social @sholtodavid.bsky.social Spent the last hour looking, found ten more apparently manipulated Western blots in Thermo Fisher's antibody verification data (across eight different catalogued products). Thread below. www.thermofisher.com/antibody/pro...
Somehow, this is not my first run-in with the Microsoft Office "Cloud" shape where it shouldn't be in the scientific literature. In another article, the authors used to add evidence of tellurium in their sample post-hoc. See pubpeer.com/publications...
the latest find: a nanoparticle in a published, peer-reviewed article, cited 58 times, that is shaped suspiciously like the "Cloud" shape from Microsoft Office.
Like a good ten percent of the images in this dataset are stock photos. At least three images are the same exact drawing. I've counted at least seven unique images of Sylvester Stallone can't stop laughing, just brilliant stuff
Many paper mills openly advertise their services online (see ads from an Iraqi and a Ukrainian paper mill below). We compiled seven different paper mills' ads and processed the prices they offer into a structured dataset.
How much does it cost to buy your way onto a scientific paper? To answer this question (and better understand the global market for academic reputation manipulation), we compiled BuyTheBy, a massive dataset of thousands of advertisements from paper mills in seven different countries. Link below!
Yup, plenty of examples of adaptation to new tools for fraud detection. Case study: Problem: 2005-2015, journals start screening submissions with text similarity software Solution: run your plagiarized text through a paraphrasing engine (Grammarly, Quillbot), often leaving "tortured phrases".
Hail in suburban Chicago last night was no joke! (1 inch = 2.54 cm)
My sister made me a personal bookplate for my birthday and it is beyond sick