Problematic images found in 4% of biomedical papers – Giant survey suggests journals should pay more attention to detecting inappropriate duplications.
« Around 1 out of every 25 biomedical papers contains inappropriately duplicated images, a huge analysis of 20,621 research articles suggests1. The finding has prompted renewed calls for research journals to routinely check images in accepted papers before they publish them.
Previous studies have analysed image duplication rates, but the latest analysis is unusually large and has the advantage of spanning multiple journals, says Bernd Pulverer, who is chief editor of The EMBO Journal in Heidelberg, Germany. He notes that although most duplications do not point to fraud or malevolence, they do misrepresent experiments. (…) »
