A set of 10 articles identified by Dr. David showed repeated reuse of identical or overlapping black-and-white images of cancer cells supposedly under different experimental conditions, he said.
“There’s no reason to have done that unless you didn’t do the job,” Dr. David said.
One of these documents, published in 2012, was officially marked with corrections. Unlike later studies, which were largely imposed by Dr. Yoon in New York, this paper was written by scientists based in South Korea, including Changhwan Yoon, who then worked in Seoul.
An immunologist in Norway randomly selected the paper as part of a review of duplicated data in cancer journals. This led the paper’s publisher, the medical journal Oncogene, to add corrections in 2016.
But the journal didn’t catch all the duplicate data, Dr. David said. And, he said, images from the study later appeared in the same form in another document that remains unredacted.
The duplicated cancer data kept repeating itself, Dr. David said. An image of a small red lump from a 2017 study resurfaced in papers in 2020 and 2021 with different descriptions, he said. A ruler included in the images for scale is wound in two different positions.
The 2020 study included another tumor image that Dr. David said appeared to mirror one previously published by Dr. David’s lab. Yoon. And the 2021 study showed a color version of a tumor that had appeared in an earlier paper over a different ruler section, Dr. David said.
“This is another example where this appears to have been done deliberately,” Dr Bik said.
The researchers faced more serious action when publisher Elsevier retracted the stomach cancer study published online in 2021. “The editors found that the article violated ethical guidelines for journal publication,” Elsevier said.
Roland Herzog, the editor of Molecular Therapy, the journal where the article appeared, said that “duplicate images were observed” as part of a screening process for discrepancies that the journal has since continued to strengthen.
Because the problems were identified before the study was published in the print journal, Elsevier policy dictated that the article be removed and no explanation be published online.
But that decision appeared to be at odds with the industry guidelines of the Publications Ethics Committee. Publishing articles online “usually constitutes publication,” these guidelines say. And when publishers pull such articles, the guidelines say, they should keep the work online for transparency and post “a clear takedown notice.”
Dr Herzog said he personally hoped such an explanation could still be published for the stomach cancer study. The journal’s editors and Elsevier, he said, are considering possible options.
The editors notified Dr. Yun and Changwan Yun about the article’s removal, but neither scientist notified Memorial Sloan Kettering, the hospital said. Columbia did not say whether it had been said.
