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Cambridge MedChem Consulting

How reliable is the literature?

In the past I've mentioned some of the concerns about antibody selectivity, the problems with irreproducible studies and the need for well characterised chemical probes. Elisabeth Bik has been looking at concerns with some of the images in the published literature, The prevalence of inappropriate image duplication in biomedical research publications. mBio 7(3):e00809-16. DOI. her Twitter feed contains yet more examples from the current literature, well worth a browse.

So completing this set, I looked at 101 papers, all published in the same month in the same journal. Of these, 63 contained photographic images (the others had only line graphs and/or tables). Of those, 8 have potential duplications. That is 12.7%

With all the advances in AI and image recognition I'm slightly disappointed that there is not a programme that can do this automatically for Elisabeth.