[Image credit: Seventyfour/Adobe Stock]
While scientific progress hinges on data integrity, plagiarism, data fabrication and image manipulation and other biomedical research scandals are ongoing concerns. An article in Science recently made waves by revealing startling conclusions from the research of the German neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel, who developed a fake-paper detector. Publishing his findings in a preprint, Sabel concluded that there were likely high proportions of falsified or plagiarized papers in neuroscience and medicine in 2020 (34% and 24% respectively). That figure is substantially higher than the findings of a 2009 study in PLOS One reporting that 2% of scientists acknowledged having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least one time in their career. The findings seem to indicate a troubling rise in data integrity scandals in medical research.To arrive at the conclusion tha…