By examining scientific articles after they are published and exposing shortcomings, he has made himself an enemy of both researchers and publishers. It has gone so far that death threats have become commonplace for him. It must be credible. He is an assistant professor at the Department of Science and Technology, where he explores how data can be visualised and used in areas such as healthcare and the judiciary.
The process of getting a scientific article published in a journal can be broken down into a number of steps. Once the study is finished and the data is collected, the researchers write a draft, or manuscript, of an article. That manuscript is then sent to one or more publishers in the hope that it will be accepted by a journal.
For the article to be accepted, it must go through something called a peer review. This is a kind of review that involves other researchers in the field reviewing the article to see that it is of good scientific quality. Hopefully, the article will then be published. It is a process that often takes a long time, in some cases several years.
But in microbiology, for example, where there are hundreds of thousands of scientists who will never meet each other, the risk of cheating increases.
In academia, cheating can mean anything from removing data points to get the results you want, to lack of ethical reviews and completely fabricated data and results featuring AI-written articles. And the fact that some such articles still slip through the peer review process is a major concern. Universities, other higher education institutions and individual researchers pay large sums of money to publishers such as Springer, Elsevier and Nature in order to publish and for the review to be correct.
