Last March, René Aquarius noticed some overlapping patterns in a figure about a 2016 study on the blood-brain barrier. An author of the study published in Neuroscience Letters responded saying they are checking the original data to figure out the problem. A month later, when Aquarius, a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, revisited the paper, the figure had been replaced without any note that the publisher had fixed the issue.
What Aquarius uncovered wasn’t an isolated case. He and his fellow research-integrity sleuths, who police various issues in scholarly literature alongside their day jobs, found 130 more cases of what they dub stealth corrections, where journals fix papers without acknowledging that they have done so. They outline their findings in a paper published as a preprint on arXiv on September 10, 2024.
