Elisabeth Bik

Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik (born 1966) is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant.[1] Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications,[2][3][4] and identifying over 400 research papers published in China from a "paper mill" company. Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest,[5] a blog with daily updates on microbiome research, and the Science Integrity Digest blog.[6][7]

Elisabeth Bik
Born
Elisabeth Margaretha Bik

1966 (age 53–54)
Netherlands
Alma materUtrecht University
Scientific career
Institutions
ThesisCholera: vaccine development and evolution of epidemic Vibrio cholerae strains (1996)

Early life and education

Bik was born in the Netherlands. She attended Utrecht University majoring in biology, and continued there for her doctorate. Her dissertation was about developing vaccines for new classes of Vibrio cholerae involved in cholera epidemics across India and Bangladesh.[8][9][10][11] Her doctorate and postdoctoral studies were conducted at the molecular microbiology department in the National Institute of Health and the Environment in Bilthoven.[12]

Career

Public sector

After receiving her Ph.D., Bik worked for the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment and St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein, where she organized the development of new molecular techniques for identifying infectious agents.[13][14]

Academia

In 2001, Bik moved to California to work at Stanford University in the laboratory of David Relman, where her work focused on human microbiomes, previously unidentified species in them, and their diversity across individuals.[15][16] Her work explored other mucosal microbiomes, confirming that the human oral microbiota contains distinct genera from the gut microbiota.[17]

While at Stanford, Bik worked on an Office of Naval Research project to study the microbiome of dolphins and sea lions in San Diego. She found that their microbiome was distinct from other mammals, and influenced by the sea they lived in.[18]

Private sector

In 2016, Bik left Stanford to work for uBiome, a biotech company involved in the sequencing of human microbiomes, before leaving the company in 2018 to work full-time on analyzing scientific papers for image duplication and other malpractices.[11]

Science integrity
See also: Scientific misconduct § Photo manipulation

In 2014, she started the blog Microbiome Digest, where she provided easy-to-understand commentaries on recent scientific papers.[19] The blog soon became a success, and Bik enlisted help from her colleagues on Twitter to manage the content.[19] She is also an active contributor to Retraction Watch and PubPeer, highlighting scientific papers that present falsified, duplicated, and questionable data, such as in western blot images.[4][20]

Together with Arturo Cassadevall and Ferric Fang, Bik published an mBio paper investigating the prevalence of these questionable practices within published scientific papers, where they found nearly 400 papers with intentional figure manipulation (i.e. about 800 duplicate images).[21] She estimates half of these were created with the intention to mislead. Bik is active on the social media micro-blogging platform, Twitter, where she posts potentially duplicated figures for her more than 60,000 Twitter followers (as of April, 2020) to investigate. Her investigations have exposed significant levels of scientific misconduct in several journals.[11] In 2018, Bik was featured on the pop science podcast "Everything Hertz."[22]

In 2019, Bik announced via Twitter that she was taking a year off paid work to investigate scientific misconduct,[19][23][24] the subject on which she coauthored a preregistered test suggesting that "academic culture, peer control, cash-based publication incentives and national misconduct policies," but not pressure to publish, may affect scientific integrity, with nationality being a stronger predictor than individual attributes.[25] Her analysis of 960 recent papers published in Molecular and Cellular Biology found that 6.1% contained inappropriately duplicated images, about 10% of which were retracted, and led to a pilot image screening program at the journal identifying problems with 14.5% of subsequent submissions.[26]

In February 2020, Science reported that Bik had identified over 400 research papers published in China over the previous three years, apparently all originating from the same "paper mill" company providing full service production of articles describing fake research for medical students on demand.[27] Bik said, "students in China need to have a paper published to get their MD, but they do not have time to do research, so that is an unrealistic goal."[28]

In March 2020, commenting on the publication of the results of a clinical trial by Didier Raoult on the effect of hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19, she identified a conflict of interest and strongly criticized the methodology of the study.[29] The learned society that owns the journal in which the results were published admitted that the publication was not at the level expected by the society, in particular due to a lack of justification of the criteria for patient selection and triage.[30] However, the society rebutted allegations of a conflict of interest, stating that the peer review process prior to publication was respected because Jean-Marc Rolain, being one of the co-authors of the article and editor of the journal, did not participate in the evaluation. The publisher Elsevier then announced an additional independent evaluation to determine whether the concerns about the article were well founded.[31]

gollark: No, not really.
gollark: Cool.
gollark: ++tel graph
gollark: +=tel graph
gollark: ++magic reload_ext telephone

References
  1. Abbott, Alison (2019-11-19). "The science institutions hiring integrity inspectors to vet their papers". Nature. 575: 430–433. doi:10.1038/d41586-019-03529-w.
  2. Shen, Helen (13 May 2020). "Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers". Nature. 581 (7807): 132–136. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-01363-z.
  3. "The Last Word On Nothing | The Fraud Finder: A conversation with Elisabeth Bik". www.lastwordonnothing.com. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  4. Oransky, Author Ivan (2019-05-07). "Meet Elisabeth Bik, who finds problematic images in scientific papers for free". Retraction Watch. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  5. "Microbiome Digest". MicrobiomeDigest.com. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  6. "Science Integrity Digest". ScienceIntegrityDigest.com. Retrieved 2019-11-24.
  7. "Maddox Prize 2019". senseaboutscience.org. Sense about Science. Retrieved 26 November 2019.
  8. Bik, Elisabeth M (1996). Cholera: vaccine development and evolution of epidemic Vibrio cholerae strains (Dissertation). Utrecht University. ISBN 90-90091-73-4.
  9. Bik, Elisabeth M.; Mooi, Frits R. (1997-04-01). "The evolution of epidemic Vibrio cholerae strains". Trends in Microbiology. 5 (4): 161–165. doi:10.1016/S0966-842X(96)10086-X. ISSN 0966-842X. PMID 9141191.
  10. Mooi, F. R.; Gouw, R. D.; Bunschoten, A. E.; Bik, E. M. (1995-01-01). "Genesis of the novel epidemic Vibrio cholerae O139 strain: evidence for horizontal transfer of genes involved in polysaccharide synthesis". The EMBO Journal. 14 (2): 209–216. doi:10.1002/j.1460-2075.1995.tb06993.x. ISSN 1460-2075.
  11. "Eye for Manipulation: A Profile of Elisabeth Bik". The Scientist Magazine®. Retrieved 2019-11-22.
  12. Bik, Elisabeth. "Elisabeth Bik - Consultant - Harbers Bik LLC". www.linkedin.com. LinkedIn. Retrieved 29 November 2019.
  13. "Elisabeth Bik". Microbiome Digest - Bik's Picks. 2016-04-28. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  14. "Profile - Elisabeth Bik". peerj.com. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  15. Relman, David A.; Nelson, Karen E.; Gill, Steven R.; Sargent, Michael; Dethlefsen, Les; Purdom, Elizabeth; Bernstein, Charles N.; Bik, Elisabeth M.; Eckburg, Paul B. (2005-06-10). "Diversity of the Human Intestinal Microbial Flora". Science. 308 (5728): 1635–1638. doi:10.1126/science.1110591. ISSN 0036-8075. PMC 1395357. PMID 15831718.
  16. Relman, David A.; Blaser, Martin J.; Perez-Perez, Guillermo; Francois, Fritz; Purdom, Elizabeth A.; Nelson, Karen E.; Gill, Steven R.; Eckburg, Paul B.; Bik, Elisabeth M. (2006-01-17). "Molecular analysis of the bacterial microbiota in the human stomach". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 103 (3): 732–737. doi:10.1073/pnas.0506655103. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 1334644. PMID 16407106.
  17. Relman, David A.; Fraser-Liggett, Claire M.; Gill, Steven R.; Nelson, Karen E.; Emmanuel F. Mongodin; Emerson, Joanne; Loomer, Peter; Armitage, Gary C.; Long, Clara Davis (August 2010). "Bacterial diversity in the oral cavity of 10 healthy individuals". The ISME Journal. 4 (8): 962–974. doi:10.1038/ismej.2010.30. ISSN 1751-7370. PMC 2941673. PMID 20336157.
  18. Bik, Elisabeth M.; Costello, Elizabeth K.; Switzer, Alexandra D.; Callahan, Benjamin J.; Holmes, Susan P.; Wells, Randall S.; Carlin, Kevin P.; Jensen, Eric D.; Venn-Watson, Stephanie; Relman, David A. (2016-02-03). "Marine mammals harbor unique microbiotas shaped by and yet distinct from the sea". Nature Communications. 7 (1): 1–13. doi:10.1038/ncomms10516. ISSN 2041-1723. PMID 26839246.
  19. "I have found about 2,000 problematic papers, says Dr. Elisabeth Bik". Editage Insights. 2019-08-08. Retrieved 2019-11-22.
  20. "PubPeer - Search publications and join the conversation". pubpeer.com. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  21. Fang, Ferric C.; Casadevall, Arturo; Bik, Elisabeth M. (2016-07-06). "The Prevalence of Inappropriate Image Duplication in Biomedical Research Publications". mBio. 7 (3): e00809–16. doi:10.1128/mBio.00809-16. ISSN 2150-7511. PMC 4941872. PMID 27273827.
  22. "Everything Hertz - Elisabeth Bik". everythinghertz.com. Retrieved 2019-09-07.
  23. Elisabeth Bik [@MicrobiomDigest] (April 26, 2019). "I am taking a year off from paid work to focus more on my science misconduct volunteer work. Science needs more help to detect image duplication, plagiarism, fabricated results, and predatory publishers" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  24. "About the Participants". FotoFocus Cincinnati. Retrieved 2019-11-22.
  25. Fanelli, Daniele; Costas, Rodrigo; Fang, Ferric C.; Casadevall, Arturo; Bik, Elisabeth M. (1 June 2019). "Testing Hypotheses on Risk Factors for Scientific Misconduct via Matched-Control Analysis of Papers Containing Problematic Image Duplications". Science and Engineering Ethics. 25 (3): 771–789. doi:10.1007/s11948-018-0023-7. ISSN 1471-5546. PMC 6591179. PMID 29460082.
  26. Bik, Elisabeth M.; Fang, Ferric C.; Kullas, Amy L.; Davis, Roger J.; Casadevall, Arturo (15 October 2018). "Analysis and Correction of Inappropriate Image Duplication: the Molecular and Cellular Biology Experience". Molecular and Cellular Biology. 38 (20). doi:10.1128/MCB.00309-18. ISSN 0270-7306. PMID 30037982. Retrieved 25 November 2019.
  27. Dalmeet Singh Chawla (27 February 2020). "A single 'paper mill' appears to have churned out 400 papers, sleuths find". Science. doi:10.1126/science.abb4930.
  28. Basu, Mohana (26 February 2020). "Researchers flag over 400 'dubious papers' published in China in last 3 years". ThePrint. Retrieved 27 February 2020.
  29. Piller, Charles (2020-04-23). "'This is insane!' Many scientists lament Trump's embrace of risky malaria drugs for coronavirus". Science. Retrieved 2020-03-26.
  30. "Publisher Now Says Study Touting Hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 Cure Doesn't Meet Its 'Standard'". News Parliament. "The ISAC Board believes the article does not meet the Society’s expected standard, especially relating to the lack of better explanations of the inclusion criteria and the triage of patients to ensure patient safety". 2020-04-06. Retrieved 2020-04-23.CS1 maint: others (link)
  31. Media, M. T. C. "ISAC / Elsevier Statement | International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy". www.isac.world. Retrieved 2020-04-23.
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