The independent researcher Elisabeth Bik, this year’s individual winner of the Einstein Foundation Award, identifies misconduct and potential fraud in scientific publications, highlighting science’s problems policing itself.

What if your pastime could change science? 
 

For Elisabeth Bik, the 2024 Einstein Foundation Award winner, that’s what happened. A decade ago, after noticing suspiciously similar images in a PhD dissertation, Bik started looking at images of Western blots – a lot of images of Western blots. The images are a decades-old tool used to show the presence or absence of proteins in biology research and are often included as part of the data set in scientific papers.
 

For two years, after work and on the weekends, Bik scanned scientific publications for Western blots and other photos that had been altered, duplicated or mirrored. She eventually looked at over 20,621 papers from 40 different journals. “It became my hobby,” she says.

What Bik found shocked her. “One in 25 papers I looked at had image problems,” she says. “I thought, ‘that’s a lot.’” When letters to researchers and journal editors responsible for the publications about the problems yielded no response, Bik decided to go public. In 2016, she and two colleagues published a paper in the journal mBio, highlighting potential scientific misconduct in hundreds of papers.
 

The trio estimated that their findings represented a tiny fraction of the overall problem. Over a million biomedical research papers are published each year, part of an industry worth billions of dollars that drives untold billions more in medical research. If her sample was representative, tens of thousands of papers might include fraudulent or erroneous data, leading to wasted money and effort for researchers building on the bad science or even harm to patients receiving treatment based on faulty studies.
 

“Her work as a scientific whistleblower is essential for ensuring the credibility of scientific research." (Csaba Szabo)

Since blowing the whistle on fraud for the first time, Bik has become a lonely crusader on behalf of scientific integrity. “Her work as a scientific whistleblower is essential for ensuring the credibility of scientific research,” says University of Freiburg biologist Csaba Szabo, who nominated Bik for the Einstein Foundation Award. “Her work should contribute to the initiation of systematic changes and improvements in the field of scientific integrity.”
 

So far, it’s been slow going. When Bik challenges them to explain duplicated or altered images, authors often claim the photos are just there as illustrations and the changes were made to “clean them up” for publication. When pressed, they claim they made honest mistakes, “or come up with the weirdest excuses – everything from plane crashes to pregnancies,” Bik says. “There’s always some kind of sob story.”
 

But Bik believes tweaked or altered images are usually an indicator of a larger problem – and evidence of scientific malpractice on its own. Western blots, for examples, are visual evidence a specific protein is present – or not – in a cell. If an experimental treatment works to stimulate or suppress production of such a protein, the blot is proof. “Those photos aren’t just illustrations, they’re part of the data,” she says. Recent cases, including several Bik helped verify, have included falsified or duplicated images in studies of treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
 

"The journals don’t seem to be very responsive, in some cases I’m not believed, or they don’t reply at all.” (Elisabeth Bik)

Her efforts have sparked angry backlash: She’s faced online harassment, and lawsuits from prominent scientists angry with her for exposing their errors or misconduct. Journals, meanwhile, often seem reluctant or unwilling to address the issue. “They don’t seem to be very responsive,” she says. “In some cases I’m not believed, or they don’t reply at all.”
 

In the years since her 2016 paper was published, fewer than half of the papers she flagged have been retracted or corrected. Institutions, too, tend to react defensively, moving to preserve their reputation and protect staffers rather than punish misconduct.
 

The response from the media has been more positive. Over the past few years, Bik has emerged as a crucial source for journalists working to expose scientific fraud and misconduct. Bik has been cited in investigations that appeared in Nature, Science and The Scientist. She’s been profiled in the New Yorker, Die Zeit, and Stat News, and wrote about her research for the New York Times. “Bik's work as a scientific whistleblower is incredibly useful for journalists worldwide to scrutinize publications competently and publicly,” microbiologist Szabo says.
 

A native of the Netherlands, Bik began her scientific career at Utrecht University, where she earned a PhD in microbiology. After moving to the U.S. in 2001, she got a job at Stanford University studying the microbiome of humans and dolphins. For many years, she ran a blog focused on developments in microbiome research.
 

For the last five years, Bik’s investigations into scientific misconduct have been her full-time job. In addition to working with journalists, she posts her findings publicly, on social media sites like Twitter and on her blog, scienceintegritydigest.com. She often calls attention to problematic papers on the website PubPeer, a forum for scientists to discuss published work that was honored with the Einstein Foundation’s Institutional Award this year; she’s one of the few contributors to do so under her real name.
 

The frequent image manipulation, she believes, is connected to the increasing pressure on researchers to publish often and in high-impact journals. “As scientists, these metrics are used to assess our value as researchers,” Bik says. “But if we focus on metrics, people are going to find a way to game those metrics.” A key part of the issue is the growth of so-called “paper mills,” shady services that charge fees to write and publish low-quality papers that are often rife with shortcuts and outright fake data.
 

Wherever it’s published, fraudulent papers are bad for science. They can lead to useless or dangerous drugs making it into the development pipeline, or simply waste taxpayer money as other researchers chase fake results into dead ends.
 

In the future, Bik fears, finding them may be harder. Many of the problematic papers Bik identified in her pioneering 2014 study were taken in the analog age, or with early digital tools. Scientists at the time, she says, were less sophisticated when it came to doctoring images and had less sophisticated tools at their disposal.

“It’s always an arms race between us and the fraudsters, and I feel like I’m running behind more and more every day.” (Elisabeth Bik)
 

Today, particularly with the advent of artificial intelligence tools capable of quickly generating or altering images, it’s much easier to conceal telltale signs an image has been altered or duplicated – or generate fake images from scratch. Bik has begun using digital tools to augment her pattern-recognition abilities, but she’s honest about her limitations. “I can only catch the dumb fraudsters,” she says. “I can’t find the ones who cover their tracks … It’s always an arms race between us and the fraudsters, and I feel like I’m running behind more and more every day.”
 

Bik hopes the Einstein Foundation Award will help her keep up and overcome the many obstacles in her work. She plans to use the prize to subscribe to more journals and pay for digital tools to analyze images, and to pay herself a salary and get help organizing her increasingly busy travel and speaking schedule. “I feel immense gratitude for this award,” she says. “Hopefully it will play an important part in normalizing this work.”
 

In the meantime, what keeps her going? “I have a very strong sense that I’m right. I see these problems and I want to convince people there’s fraud in science,” Bik says. “What fuels me is anger at people who cheat.”