A prestigious cancer institute is correcting dozens of papers and retracting others after a blogger cried foul

 The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has requested the retraction of six studies and corrections in another 31 papers after a scathing critique drew attention to alleged errors a blogger and biologist said range from sloppiness to “really serious concerns.” 

The allegations — against top scientists at the prestigious Boston-based institute, which is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School — put the institute at the center of a roiling debate about research misconduct, how to police scientific integrity and whether the organizational structure of academic science incentivizes shortcuts or cheating. 

The criticism also spotlights how artificial intelligence is playing a growing role in catching sloppy or dubious science.  

After the publication of David’s blog, Dr. Barrett Rollins, the institute’s integrity research officer, said in a statement emailed Wednesday that Dana-Farber scientists had requested that six manuscripts be retracted, that 31 manuscripts were in the process of being corrected and that one manuscript remained under examination. 


Rollins added that some of the papers flagged by David had already come up in “ongoing reviews” conducted previously by the institute.

“The presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author’s intent to deceive,” Rollins said. “That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response. Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct.”

Scientific errors in published work has been a focal point in the scientific community in recent years. The website Retraction Watch, a website that tracks withdrawn papers, counts more than 46,000 papers recorded in its database. The organization’s record of withdrawn work stretches back into the 1970s. A 2016 Nature article said more than 1 million papers in the biomedical field are published each year.  

The website PubPeer, which allows outside researchers to post critiques of research that has been peer-reviewed and printed in journals, is a popular forum for scientists to flag problems. David said he has written more than 1,000 anonymous critiques on the website. 

David said a trail of questionable science led him to Dana-Farber. In a prior investigation, David scrutinized the work of a Columbia University surgeon. He found flaws in the work of collaborators of the surgeon, which ultimately drew his attention toward the leadership team at Dana-Farber. 



He found a slew of image errors, many of which could be explained by sloppy copy-paste work or a mix-up, but also others where images are stretched or rotated, which is more difficult to explain. Some errors were previously identified on PubPeer by other users. David combined those previous concerns with his own findings in a blog post taking aim at the institute. The Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper, was first to publish a news story about the accusations. 

David said images of mice in one paper looked like they had been digitally altered in ways that appeared intentional and could skew takeaways from the paper.  

“I don’t understand how that would come as an accident,” David said. 

Most of the errors are “less serious” and might have been accidents, he said. Still, the rash of mistakes, to David, indicates a broken research and review process if no one caught them before publication. 

“When you spot a duplication, that’s a symptom of a problem,” David said. 

Elisabeth Bik, a scientist who investigates image manipulation and research misconduct, said David’s work was credible.

“The allegations he’s raising are exactly the same thing I would raise. They’re spot on,” Bik said. 

Bik, who has been doing this type of sleuthing for about 10 years, said she is often frustrated by the lack of response from academic institutions when she flags errors. She said she was glad to see that Dana-Farber responded and had already taken proactive steps to correct the scientific record. 

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