Top all-time · #2732
Elisabeth Bik
Personal blog · scienceintegritydigest.comscience
Elisabeth Bik writes Science Integrity Digest, a personal blog at scienceintegritydigest.com about science. Since 2020, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “The rat with the big balls – how Frontiers published botched AI-generated images”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Elisabeth Bik's blog for documenting image manipulation and other integrity problems in scientific papers, including retractions and high-profile cases like Gino and Stanford.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog about science integrity, by Elisabeth Bik, for Harbers-Bik LLC. Support my work at Patreon.com/elisabethbik
Most-linked posts?
- The rat with the big balls – how Frontiers published botched AI-generated images5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-02-16
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-19
- /2019/06/01/an-astrophysicist-who-decapitates-birds-and-wants-to-infect-pregnant-women-with-viruses/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-23
- Science Integrity Digest: A Year in Review2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-07
- /2023/06/27/concerns-about-12-md-anderson-cancer-centers-pathology-papers/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-20
- Citation Statistics and Citation Rings2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-11
- The Tadpole Paper Mill2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-02-22
What Hacker News says?
Maybe your friend could reach out to people like Elisabeth Bik, who blogs here: https://scienceintegritydigest.com/ Alternatively, maybe the people behind the Data Colada blog can help: https://datacolada.org/
Comment linking /
on “A Post Mortem on the Gino Case”Submitted Paper about Herbalife-related patient death removed after legal threats as a story · 444 points
HN discussionI feel like this study is missing the forest for the trees. Which section of society has the highest trust in scientists? Probably it's other scientists, closely followed by science journalists. Yet this article is set in the paradigm in which people are divided into "the public" and "scientists", with the latter being universally correct and the former in need of education by the latter. Over the past few years I'v…
Comment linking /2019/11/11/photoshop-as-a-management-modality/
on “Trusting science leaves people vulnerable to believing pseudoscience”Submitted The Tadpole Paper Mill as a story · 51 points
HN discussionWhat the hell!? This is insanity! > https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2023/06/27/concerns-about...
Comment linking /2023/06/27/concerns-about-12-md-anderson-cancer-centers-pathology-papers/
on “Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers”Submitted Predatory journal accepts fake story about scooters and hydroxychloroquine as a story · 50 points
HN discussionSome links: https://scienceintegritydigest.com/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Bik
Comment linking /
on “Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers”Submitted The Camel's Camel as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHer site is: https://scienceintegritydigest.com/about/ https://scienceintegritydigest.com/ She wrote an op-ed in the NYT last year: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/scien... She says her work has led to 938 papers being retracted. One of the interesting parts to me is that most of her work seems to be completely manual. She seems to have an eye for seeing photoshop on microscopy images or image…
Comment linking /
on “Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers”Submitted The rat with the big balls and the enormous as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBefore someone asks about why can't this work be automated, here's the FAQ where she answers this question. https://scienceintegritydigest.com/frequently-asked-question...
Comment linking /frequently-asked-questions/
on “A sharp-eyed scientist became biology’s image detective”Submitted The rat with the big balls – how Frontiers published botched AI-generated images as a story · 2 points
HN discussionElisabeth Bik is a real hero. the amount of unpaid hours she has put into detecting fraud in published scientific papers is unbelievable and a true service to the scientific community. Her work is pure positive externality: nobody has incentive to pay for it. Journals barely care about fraud (as long as it's not caught by someone else), reviewers don't have much incentive to check carefully for it (and might even be…
Comment linking /2020/12/31/2020-a-year-in-review/
on “A sharp-eyed scientist became biology’s image detective”Submitted The Tadpole Paper Mill as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is gold “Worst paper of 2020?” https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2020/07/23/worst-paper-of...
Comment linking /2020/07/23/worst-paper-of-2020-5g-and-coronavirus-induction/
on “Many scientists citing two scandalous Covid-19 papers ignore their retractions”Submitted When to Correct or Retract a Paper? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI saw a story recently about a school in Kentucky that published student agendas with AI and apparently no human supervision, and it had hallucinated states and elements on the periodic table and the like[0]. This shouldn't happen, even with the most optimistic estimates of AI's capabilities being true, yet there is a cultlike mentality around it that leads people to lose their minds and throw even basic common sens…
Comment linking /2024/02/15/the-rat-with-the-big-balls-and-enormous-penis-how-frontiers-published-a-paper-with-botched-ai-generated-images/
on “I don't enjoy the Internet any more”Submitted Frontiers published a paper with botched AI-generated images as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThose images make me think of https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2024/02/15/the-rat-with-t...
Comment linking /2024/02/15/the-rat-with-the-big-balls-and-enormous-penis-how-frontiers-published-a-paper-with-botched-ai-generated-images/
on “AI fatigue Is real and nobody talks about it”Submitted Citation Statistics and Citation Rings as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA little background on Massimo Fioranelli and Alireza Sepehri: https://twitter.com/microbiomdigest/status/12886848640702504... https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2019/06/01/an-astrophysic...
Comment linking /2019/06/01/an-astrophysicist-who-decapitates-birds-and-wants-to-infect-pregnant-women-with-viruses/
on “A Black Hole at the Center of Earth”Submitted Science Integrity Digest: A Year in Review as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA tweet thread and an article on this author https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24562496 https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2019/06/01/an-astrophysic...
Comment linking /2019/06/01/an-astrophysicist-who-decapitates-birds-and-wants-to-infect-pregnant-women-with-viruses/
on “A Black Hole at the Center of Earth”Submitted The Surgisphere Founder and the Melba Toast Figure as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> and all ads should be blocked I can feel with your sentiment, but don’t see a practical way to do that. Define “ad”. Is “read more in my blog” an ad? Is “see Foo’s blog at …” an ad? “Read Foo’s excellent blog”? “Read more here” in a blog entry? If you say “when it is paid for it’s an ad”, how do you detect that? And what is “paid”? In a webring ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring ) people reciprocally ‘pay’ ea…
Comment linking /2022/03/23/citation-statistics-and-citation-rings/
on “Keep Stuff Linkable”Submitted Thghts on Gautret ea paper on Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin COVID19 treatment as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI used to follow a blog (possibly retraction watch? I can't remember now) where they would go through basic biology papers and find photoshopped/edited images and ask the author about them. Sometimes this would lead to retractions etc. They did mention other people had tried and failed to build tools for this, but the current state of the art was drinking-a-coffee-and-looking-at-it-real-hard. This was before the cur…
Comment linking /
on “There is a worrying amount of fraud in medical research”> People can share data in whatever format they have and it wouldn’t be hard for me or others to import it one way or another. It's one thing for a highly-skilled user with a decade of experience to be able to import it eventually, another for an unskilled user to just have off-the-shelf tooling do it the same way for everyone automatically. This is more about meta-studies and unlocking new use cases. It sucks that…
Comment linking /2023/06/27/concerns-about-12-md-anderson-cancer-centers-pathology-papers/
on “Open-source could finally get the world’s microscopes speaking the same language”
