Science Sleuths Raise Concerns About Scores of Bioengineering Papers

upstart writes:

Science sleuths raise concerns about scores of bioengineering papers:

In December 2024, Elisabeth Bik noticed irregularities in a few papers by a highly-cited bioengineer, Ali Khademhosseini. She started looking at more publications for which he was a co-author, and the issues soon piled up: some figures were stitched together strangely, and images of cells and tissues were duplicated, rotated, mirrored and sometimes reused and labelled differently.

Bik, a microbiologist and leading research-integrity specialist based in San Francisco, California, ended up flagging about 80 papers on PubPeer, a platform that allows researchers to review papers after publication. A handful of other volunteer science sleuths found more, bringing the total to 90.

The articles were published in 33 journals over 20 years and have been cited a combined total of 14,000 times. Although there are hundreds of co-authors on the papers, the sleuthing effort centred on Khademhosseini, who is a corresponding author for about 60% of them.

He and his co-authors sprang into action. Responding to the concerns, some of which were reported in the blog For Better Science, became like a full-time job, says Khademhosseini, who until August was director and chief executive of the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation in Los Angeles, California. "I alerted journals, I alerted collaborators. We tried to do our best to make the literature correct." In many cases, he and his co-authors provided original source data to journal editors, and the papers were corrected.

Khademhosseini told Nature that investigations into his work have been carried out and have found no evidence of misconduct by him. The Terasaki Institute says that an "internal review has not found that Dr. Khademhosseini engaged in research misconduct".

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