LA manipulation of images has become one of the most common forms of scientific fraud. Dispute, discreet duplications or subtle modifications of contrasts, orientations, or scales: these practices, often difficult to detect for non -seasoned eyes, compromise the integrity of publications and distort the results of the research.
For scientists who track it down, manipulation of images is unfortunately not a marginal phenomenon. In certain fields such as biology or medicine, where images play a central role in demonstrating results, their omnipresence is clear. Dr. Elisabeth Bik, a perchange of scientific integrity problems, already reported in 2016 that 3.8 % of the 20,000 publications she had analyzed contained distorted images.
Scientific integrity
In the simplest cases, images are directly copied/glued to the same article which makes them, for a sharp eye, easy to detect. In order to illustrate the different types of manipulations, Dr. Bik uses a series of simple examples on his blog. It highlights the duplicated portions via green rectangles.
The examples of duplications used by Dr. Bik seem simple and easy to find. However, its results demonstrate that this type of manipulation is often used within scientific articles. For example, in a 2012 article dealing with a processing approach […] Read more
