Problematic images found in 4% of biomedical papers

Flagging incorrect nucleotide sequence reagents in biomedical papers: To what extent does the leading publication format impede automatic error detection?

In an idealised vision of science the scientific literature is error-free. Errors reported during peer review are supposed to be corrected prior to publication, as further research establishes new knowledge based on the body of literature. It happens, however, that errors pass through peer review, and a minority of cases errata and retractions follow. Automated screening software can be applied to detect errors in manuscripts and publications. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we designed the erroneous reagent checking () benchmark to assess the accuracy of fact-checkers screening biomedical publications for dubious mentions of nucleotide sequence reagents. It comes with a test collection comprised of 1679 nucleotide sequence reagents that were curated by biomedical experts. Second, we benchmarked our own screening software called Seek&Blastn with three input formats to assess the extent of performance loss when operating on various publication formats. Our findings stress the superiority of markup formats (a 79% detection rate on XML and HTML) over the prominent PDF format (a 69% detection rate at most) regarding an error flagging task. This is the first published baseline on error detection involving reagents reported in biomedical scientific publications. The benchmark is designed to facilitate the development and validation of software bricks to enhance the reliability of the peer review process.

[Research Misconduct in Japan and How It Is Covered by the Media]

　Cases of research misconduct (fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism) have been increasing worldwide, including in Japan. In particular, since 2006, many cases of research misconduct have been reported in Japan, and these cases have also been covered by the media. The 2014 case of the withdrawal of articles on STAP cells followed a rare course in which research misconduct became a full-blown social phenomenon. In recent years, even the University of Tokyo has experienced reported cases of research misconduct. In this report, I would like to introduce some representative cases of research misconduct in the field of life sciences over the past decade. These examples include studies conducted at Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine (2006), Osaka University Graduate School of Frontier Bioscience (2006), Ryukyu University School of Medicine (2010), Toho University School of Medicine (2012), The University of Tokyo Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences (2013), and several cases outside of Japan. I will discuss what researchers should do to reduce the incidence of research misconduct. In addition, I will discuss how these cases were covered by the media, because the public's impression of research misconduct is formed by media coverage.