Silly errors can put many studies at risk of being revoked

An error is not allowed in the review process, but it happened.

According to a recent report on bioRxiv, tens of thousands of studies in the scientific journal Molecular and Cellular Biology will need to be reviewed. And the reason comes from an extremely unexpected error, which is the image of repeated studies.

This reason is judged to be extremely silly and unacceptable, as it is the first condition when a study is reviewed before publication.

More specifically, experts from bioRxiv reviewed 960 biomedical studies in the period of 2009 - 2016. By using the latest software, they realized 6% had duplicate images. In other words, some studies have used photographs of previous studies, and then used them as their research results.

The cause comes from an extremely unexpected error, which is the image of repeated studies.

A total of 59 cases, of which 42 were edited, 12 remained unchanged (due to the closure of the research laboratory), and 5 were withdrawn.

However, according to Elisabeth Bik - research director, this overlap rate is acceptable, as it may be an error when using data."We believe the authors study when they say that duplication is just a mistake. Our goal is to make sure the results are correct, not to punish anyone," Bik said.

"With the revoked cases, it is because there are too many errors that need to be corrected, or because the results are a bit suspicious".

According to Bik, they previously used the software to analyze more than 20,000 studies and found that 3.8% of them had duplicate images. And if this ratio is applied to a total of more than 9 million studies over the past 7 years, it is estimated that about 11% of the errors must be recovered. This is equivalent to more than 35,000 studies.

And even though Bik thinks it's not worrisome, many experts seem to be quite cold. They argue that this is a serious problem, related to the review and inspection process before publication of the study. People who are on the test need to be more careful, or have some solution to avoid missing out on such cases.

"This study demonstrates that both authors and evaluators must double their efforts to avoid such repeated images."