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  • NEWS FEATURE

Meet this super-spotter of duplicated images in science papers

Elisabeth Bik quit her job to spot errors in research papers — and has become the public face of image sleuthing.
By
  1. Helen Shen

    1. Helen Shen is a science journalist based in Sunnyvale, California.

Elisabeth Bik poses for a portrait taken through glass reflecting a garden showing her sitting at a table with a large monitor

Credit: Gabriela Hasbun for Nature

February the fourteenth starts like most other days for Elisabeth Bik: checking her phone in bed, she scrolls through a slew of Twitter notifications and private messages from scientists seeking her detective services. Today’s first request is from a researcher in Belgium: “Hi! I know you have a lot of people asking you to use your magic powers to analyse figures, blots and others but I just wanted to ask your opinion…”

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Nature 581, 132-136 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01363-z

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