Sholto David

Chris Gaffe (director of research integrity at Springer Nature) said in 2024: "Scientific Reports has an in-house team who are dedicated to ensuring that the journal operates with integrity. They are an excellent team who care enormously about the journal and the research it publishes."

Another wonderful diagram of "bacterial mitochondria", this time from Scientific Reports in 2025. The whole paper is fake, but the diagram is still delightful. pubpeer.com/publications...

The Men Who Stare At Mice “Do Cohen’s colleagues and superiors know or care that he hosts wizards in his lab? Or perhaps this is simply common place, wizards roam throughout MD Anderson free range, blasting the …

100% serious, there's a guy at MD Anderson doing these same psychic moves on mice. forbetterscience.com/2025/02/26/t...

It's unscientific. They should have had the cursed group.

Looks exactly like the kind of guy who would bless an egg and then eat the chicken too.

Happy to share a new peer-reviewed study on PubMed. Blessing eggs creates bigger and tastier chickens (p < 0.001). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41035978/

And I should clarify, the majority of those 80 papers are still in my queue.

pubpeer.com/publications...

I used my own method to find this and followed up with ImageTwin which found more. I would like to scan the entire Science family back catalogue, but I can't get around cloudflare.

Science Family journals use Proofig for image duplication detection. In January, Holden said they'd only documented 23 problems out of the last 2000 papers scanned, impressive! I downloaded the last 80 papers from Science Advances and found this published 2 days ago.

Alison found another... I think it might be worse.

Adding to the previous diagram by Anna, I can see tiny little football looking things (red arrows) and some of the surrounding area.

Here's the paper I posted about: doi.org/10.3390/jnt5...

Great find! The one you found is even better 😂

Recent MDPI paper including diagram of a bacterial cell with a mitochondrion 🤦‍♀️ The authors propose a mechanism for the toxicity of silver nanoparticles: "Ag+ ions in AgNPs bombard the bacterial mitochondria’s electron transport chain, resulting in cell death".

As Fabian says - some people are compulsive fiddlers, manipulators, and (frankly) liars. They would change the data simply for the sake of changing it. Because it is their habit. I have personally met people who lie even when it damages their own credibility. I suspect the same is true of data.

One thing to consider is that the only good reason to manipulate an image is to make it show something that it didn't show in the first place. Perhaps what was there originally was not background? A defect? A particle? Someone's watermark or label from another paper.

Thanks, Dorothy, glad you found it interesting! Funny thing is I dislike cycling in Oxford very strongly, even though they call it a "cycling city". Catch up soon 😊

"Criminal" seems to be any behaviour which Wafik doesn't like 🤷‍♀️

In Bad Company “Authors thank the members of NeuroDigitech for their contribution to data generation, and all the animals that contributed to these studies.”

A CRO has been scamming academic and industry labs in the US with fraudulent data that has been published in Nature and other high impact journals. Leonid has written a great piece on my findings: forbetterscience.com/2025/09/22/i...

YouTube video by Sholto David Cycling Alone from the UK to China: 10,000 km in 90 days

In 2024 I cycled from the UK to China. I finally finished a vlog, so here it is if you'd like to watch it. It's a glorified holiday album with some complaints and maps 😂 youtu.be/MdgHZPfivVA

I have been blogging at For Better Science. Revisiting Queen's University in Belfast: forbetterscience.com/2025/09/16/f...

Great spot by Yong‐Chang Zhou who was first on the scene! I wonder how they spotted it? This is a relatively new account on PubPeer that is quite active. pubpeer.com/publications...

"Outsourcing" strikes again!

Four different papers, including one in Nature. The images appear to have been provided by a CDMO (Neurodigitech, LLC) to different teams in the US. Researchers have been adding these beautified and recycled images into their papers like they're filling up a sticker book.

Also see here from the same team:
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Even in 2024 and 2025 after so much scandal there are still name brand labs publishing photoshopped neuroscience images...

Yes - I was only being silly. Dove Press have been very quick too.

This is bad news.

Shooting people whose views we disagree with can only take us in a terrible direction.

I don't think this is a problem. Is there any recorded instance of a journal acting faster than several months?