Here’s news of a disturbing trend: scientists are apparently taking to photoshopping their images.
Money quote:
One new check on science images, though, is the blogosphere. As more papers are published in open-access journals, an informal group of watchdogs has emerged online.
“There’s a lot of folks who in their idle moments just take a good look at some figures randomly,” says John E. Dahlberg, director of the division of investigative oversight at the Office of Research Integrity. “We get allegations almost weekly involving people picking up problems with figures in grant applications or papers.”
Such online watchdogs were among those who first identified problems with images and other data in a cloning paper published in Science by Woo Suk Hwang, a South Korean researcher. The research was eventually found to be fraudulent, and the journal retracted the paper.
Katrina L. Kelner, deputy editor of life sciences at Science, argues that the level of fabrication in the Hwang paper was so pervasive that it would not have been detected even if the journal had used the latest image-checking tools.
Since that instance, however, the journal has started spot-checking images in every paper before publication.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 