academic-integrity.bsky.social
just a scientist who cares about scientific integrity.
Find things I find on pubpeer, user "Archasia Belfragei"
393 posts
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68 following
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Truly magnificent!
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The Weinstein brothers will be in charge of NASA & Smithsonian and mandate us to live by Eric's stupid 'Theory of Everything' by next week if we keep going at this pace...
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It is a lab that values recycling and sustainable science a lot! So much so that instead of producing new data (and waste), why not just reuse what we already have, right? We can just change the labels, no one will notice!
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Ups, I did indeed confuse the alias, sorry!!
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(2/2) It also does not seem to accurately address a concern spotted by @mumumouse2.bsky.social in Sep. 2023 already. I think there is a lot wrong with this paper, and editorial action should go beyond this inaccurate Expression of Concern...
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This would still imply that someone has read it before it is published. Something that I think is not always (actually, in that journal, rarely) the case...
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Well I think this should have never passed review. I think we can consider both the publisher and the author responsible for this. One shouldn't cite 40 papers for such a statement in any scenario, you learn that in undergrad...
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Tell Elsevier, because they keep publishing these artistic masterpieces on a daily basis D>D
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I have written a comment on PubPeer asking for clarification:
pubpeer.com/publications...
ty for notifying me about this!
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they are duplicates, yes. But they describe different materials in the legend so this seems problematic. This should be posted on pubpeer!
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Pretty cool journal, right? I present to you, same journal, and hot off the press: Teng et al. 2025 (DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2025.144007) pubpeer.com/publications...
Pretty high-effort to make up some SEM images. I didn't mark everything & keep finding more the more I look at them. Magnificent work!
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Pretty cool journal, right? I present to you, same journal, and hot off the press: Teng et al. 2025 (DOI: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2025.144007) pubpeer.com/publications...
Pretty high-effort to make up some SEM images. I didn't mark everything & keep finding more the more I look at them. Magnificent work!
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Of course there is. Sajad Pirsa is a coauthor on at least 13 problematic articles & I am working on article number 14. Most of their research seems fraudulent. Someone who completely makes up XRD has no ethical standard and likely doesn't cheat for the first time. pubpeer.com/search?q=Saj...
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There is, I have flagged about 10 papers in total, most suffering from similar problems.
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I should however stress that the last author A. Hebeish, has 6 additional articles with serious integrity concerns on PubPeer so I am not sure how innocent these mistakes might be.
pubpeer.com/search?q=%27...
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Whatever the reason is, I think we can both agree that it substantially compromises the figures and subsequent interpretation/conclusions and the paper should be retracted. The authors seem to have come to the same conclusion, so I will give them that. No idea what caused it of course.
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Don't you think that modifications to half of the papers figures post publication (and after peer review) is somewhat problematic? I understand an error in maybe 1 figure, but 3?
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(2/2) So normal in-fact that when @nvitiensis.bsky.social took a look at the same figure he found even more. This "random" noise looks a bit too similar, doesn't it? I would guess they took 1 spectrum and then sketched different peaks on top of it. #ImageForensics
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(13/13) Although hard to argue, in some cases one might see an honest mistake. But when more than 10% of all articles contain obvious image integrity issues and sometimes data is reused from 5 years prior to represent a different experiment, then I think an "accident" doesn't explain things anymore
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(12/x) And finally, from last year, we have an interesting, not suspicious at all, collaboration with an exclusively Chinese team: Wang et al. 2024 (DOI: 10.1038/s41419-024-06845-w) pubpeer.com/publications.... Curious how this co-authorship came about...
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(11/x) Histology images in this one are also all-over-the-place: Trotta et al. 2021 (DOI: 10.3390/ijms22126280). Also an interesting collaboration with a lot of Italians but Hermenean as senior author. pubpeer.com/publications...
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(10/x) Between 2020 and 2024, we saw 9 more problematic papers. I will just post the "highlights" here because this thread is already getting pretty long.
Codreanu et al. 2020 (DOI: 10.3390/ma13061433) recycled from a 2019 paper with different experimental conditions...
pubpeer.com/publications...
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(9/x) Following that, we saw more of the same well established MO in 2017 and 2019: Folk et al. 2017 (DOI: 10.1177/1559325817703461) pubpeer.com/publications... & Dinescu et al. 2019 (DOI: 10.3390/ijms20205077)
pubpeer.com/publications...
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(8/x) in 2017, they started getting lazy so instead of coming up with new (fake) data & experiments, they just recycled some old papers and seemingly made up some experiments around them: Hermenean et al. 2017 (DOI: 10.3892/etm.2017.4181) pubpeer.com/publications...
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(7/x) They also re-visted Elsevier's 'Chemico-Biological Interactions': Balta et al. 2015 (DOI: 10.1016/j.cbi.2015.08.013). pubpeer.com/publications...
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(6/x) Because all of that didn't cause any problems they got more unhinged in their cheating: Radu et al. 2015 (DOI: 10.3390/ijms161226173). This is just 1 of 4 papers by her in 'MDPI international journal of molecular sciences' that I have flagged... pubpeer.com/publications...
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(5/x) 2013 was a 'good' year with two more sketchy papers getting through review: Hermenean et al. 2013 (DOI: 10.1089/jmf.2013.0007) pubpeer.com/publications... and Dinescu et al. 2013 (DOI: 10.1155/2013/598056) pubpeer.com/publications... #ResearchIntegrity
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(4/x) To remain in chronological order: Hermenean et al. 2013 (DOI: 10.1016/j.cbi.2013.06.016). Once again, histology images from two different groups partially overlap. This time, published in the Elsevier outlet 'Chemico-Biological Interactions'. pubpeer.com/publications...
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(3/x) The oldest problematic article that I have found was a first-author paper by her from 2012 with a fairly obvious image overlap: Hermenean et al. 2012 (DOI: 10.3390/ijms13079014), published in MDPI International Journal of Molecular Sciences pubpeer.com/publications... #ImageForensics