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Science sleuths raise concerns about scores of bioengineering papers [nature.com]:

In December 2024, Elisabeth Bik noticed irregularities in a few papers by a highly-cited bioengineer, Ali Khademhosseini. She started looking at more publications for which he was a co-author, and the issues soon piled up: some figures were stitched together strangely, and images of cells and tissues were duplicated, rotated, mirrored and sometimes reused and labelled differently.

Bik, a microbiologist and leading research-integrity specialist based in San Francisco, California, ended up flagging about 80 papers on PubPeer, a platform that allows researchers to review papers after publication. A handful of other volunteer science sleuths found more, bringing the total to 90.

The articles were published in 33 journals over 20 years and have been cited a combined total of 14,000 times. Although there are hundreds of co-authors on the papers, the sleuthing effort centred on Khademhosseini, who is a corresponding author for about 60% of them.

Why retractions data could be a powerful tool for cleaning up science

He and his co-authors sprang into action. Responding to the concerns, some of which were reported in the blog For Better Science, became like a full-time job, says Khademhosseini, who until August was director and chief executive of the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation in Los Angeles, California. “I alerted journals, I alerted collaborators. We tried to do our best to make the literature correct.” In many cases, he and his co-authors provided original source data to journal editors, and the papers were corrected.

Khademhosseini told Nature that investigations into his work have been carried out and have found no evidence of misconduct by him. The Terasaki Institute says that an “internal review has not found that Dr. Khademhosseini engaged in research misconduct”.

The case raises questions about oversight in large laboratories and about when a paper needs to be retracted and when a correction is sufficient. In some cases, journals have issued corrections for papers containing issues that research-integrity sleuths describe as “clearly data manipulation”, and the corrections were issued without source data. Bik and others argue that this approach sets a bad precedent. “I don’t think that any part of a study that bears these signs of data manipulation should be trusted,” says Reese Richardson, who studies data integrity at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He argues that such papers should be retracted.

Khademhosseini defends the corrections and says that the conclusions of the papers still hold. He says he has not seen any “conclusive evidence” of misconduct or “purposeful manipulation” in the papers, and nothing that would require a retraction.

Finding flaws

For three decades, Khademhosseini has developed biomedical technologies such as organs on chips [nature.com] and hydrogel wound treatments. His work has been funded by the US National Institutes of Health, and by other public and private agencies. As a PhD student, he worked under Robert Langer [nature.com], a renowned bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Khademhosseini has published more than 1,000 papers, which have been cited more than 100,000 times in total. He has also received numerous awards and honours — most recently, the 2024 Biomaterials Global Impact Award, from the journal Biomaterials.

This science sleuth revealed a retraction crisis at Indian universities

Journal Reference:
Just a moment..., (DOI: 10.1063%2F1.1795362 [doi.org])

Original Submission