Dutch microbiologist Elisabeth Bik had quite a conclusion to 2021. For the past seven years, Bik has actively investigated questionable practices in scientific publications, and in 2019 she announced she was taking a year off work to do so full time. She is now best known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific papers and identifying more than 4,000 potential cases of improper research conduct. Among these instances were 400 research papers published by authors in China from a research paper mill company.
In June, the journal Science (372: 1021, June 4) reported that Bik had been threatened with legal action by a French researcher who has published on the benefits of “healing energy” and demanded she retract her critiques and apologize. More than 1,400 researchers signed an open letter—and more than 3,000 others signed a petition—defending Bik. The letter expressed concern that “legitimate scientific criticism can be squelched by behaviors that go beyond scholarly debate.” She reported that after she blogged about her concerns about a widely publicized paper the researcher had published on the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, she faced months of harassment on Twitter from the researcher and his colleagues. They published her full home address.
Earlier she identified 400 research papers published in China over a three-year period, all appearing to originate from a company that provides full-service production of articles describing fake research for medical students in China who are required to publish a paper to get their medical degree but haven’t the time to do it.
(She also helped physicist and CSI Fellow Mark Boslough confirm photo manipulation in a questionable research paper he reported on in the Skeptical Inquirer, “Sodom Meteor Strike Claims Should Be Taken with a Grain of Salt,” January/February 2022.)
Bik’s efforts have led to retractions and corrections of published work and have inspired new standards and mechanisms for journals to screen images included in scientific papers.
She has gotten some accolades for her work (including from the Microbiology Society in 2020), but in the space of one week in December 2021, Bik was greeted with two major new honors: she was named recipient of the John Maddox Prize for “outstanding work exposing widespread threats to research integrity in scientific papers,” and U.K.’s Skeptic magazine named her recipient of its 2021 Ockham Award for Skeptical Activism.
The Maddox Prize is given annually by the journal Nature and the nonprofit Sense about Science to scientists deemed to have defended and explained science. It is named for former longtime Nature editor John Maddox, who was himself a tireless defender of research integrity and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. The prize recognized Bik’s work exposing image manipulation, plagiarism, data manipulation, and methodological concerns in 5,000 scientific papers.
“Science builds upon science, and science publications that contain errors or even fraudulent data should be discussed, corrected, or even retracted,” Bik said. “Unfortunately, as I have experienced in the past years, being critical about scientific papers can lead to online harassment, doxing, and threats of lawsuits and jailtime.”
The Skeptic’s Ockham Award for skeptical activism was presented to Bik at a December 9 Skeptic’s in the Pub online event. Michael Marshall, editor of The Skeptic, said:
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that scientific integrity is more important than ever, and public trust in science is a vital part of public health. While that can mean raising up outstanding science wins like the vaccine development across the world in response to this pandemic, it can also mean identifying and acting on fraudulent, mistaken, plagiarized, or just plain bad science.
Dr. Elisabeth Bik has been working on exactly this since 2013. Her effort to manually identify image manipulation and duplications in scientific publications has been unparalleled, and her contribution to critical thinking and research integrity makes her a worthy recipient of this year’s Ockham Award.