by A set of 10 papers identified by Dr. David showed the repeated reuse of identical or overlapping black-and-white images of cancer cells purportedly under different experimental conditions, he said.
“There’s no reason to have done that unless you weren’t doing the work,” Dr. David said.
One of those documents, published in 2012, was formally tagged with corrections. Unlike later studies, which were largely supervised by Dr. Yoon in New York, this paper was written by scientists based in South Korea, including Changhwan Yoon, who was then working in Seoul.
An immunologist in Norway randomly selected the item as part of a selection of data copied from cancer journals. That led the article’s publisher, the medical journal Oncogene, to add fixes in 2016.
But the magazine did not capture all the duplicate datasaid Dr. David. And, he said, the studio images later appeared in identical form on another role That remains uncorrected.
The copied cancer data kept appearing, Dr. David said. An image of a small red tumor from a study 2017 reappeared in articles 2020 and 2021 under different descriptions, he said. A scale ruler included in the images ended up in two different positions.
He study 2020 included another image of the tumor that, according to Dr. David, appeared to be a mirror image of one previously posted by Dr. Yoon’s laboratory. And the study 2021 It featured a color version of a tumor that had appeared in a previous article on top of a different section of the rule, Dr. David said.
“This is another example where this appears to be done intentionally,” Dr. Bik said.
Researchers faced more serious action when publisher Elsevier removed the stomach cancer study that had been published online in 2021. “The editors determined that the article violated ethical journal publication guidelines,” Elsevier said.
Roland Herzog, editor of Molecular Therapy, the journal where the article appeared, said that “image duplications were noted” as part of a discrepancy detection process that the journal has continued to strengthen since then.
Because the problems were detected before the study was published in the print journal, Elsevier’s policy dictated that the article be removed and no explanation posted online.
But that decision seemed to conflict with industry guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics. Posting articles online “normally constitutes publication,” those guidelines state. And when editors remove such articles, the guidelines say, they should keep the work online for the sake of transparency and post “a clear retraction notice.”
Dr. Herzog said he personally hoped that explanation for the stomach cancer study could still be published. The journal’s editors and Elsevier, he said, are examining possible options.
The editors notified Dr. Yoon and Changhwan Yoon of the article’s removal, but neither scientist alerted Memorial Sloan Kettering, the hospital said. Columbia did not say whether it had been told.
