Between December 2017 and June 2018, our editorial offices received several manuscripts that clearly point to systematic fabrication of Western blots. FEBS Press implemented its image integrity screening programme in 2016, and we have since adopted a policy where we carefully screen the figures of every accepted manuscript prior to publication for potential image manipulation and inappropriate practice. The most common figure manipulations we encounter typically consist of duplications, erasing or the introduction of spurious elements to an existing image. Raising even more concern than this, however, are entirely fabricated images that are most likely not even based on any valid experiments.

Over the course of 6 months, FEBS Press received two clusters of manuscripts submitted to two different journals, five in FEBS Letters and seven in the FEBS Journal. Although the manuscripts were editorially rejected, they caught our attention as all of them contained Western blots that looked unusually uniform, clean and regular. We also noticed strong similarities between the figures of these manuscripts in terms of overall figure composition, layout/design of the graphs and the use of fonts. The iThenticate scores for the manuscripts ranged between 36% and 60%, but there was no flagrant patchwriting. The manuscripts all came from the same country, from various affiliations; some are from the same institute, but all from different departments. With the exception of one author who appeared on two of the manuscripts, none of the authors’ names repeated throughout.

Careful screening of the figures with image integrity tools revealed that many individual bands from various unrelated panels are extremely similar (Fig. 1). The background to a large number of Western blots looks identical (Fig. 2), suggesting that the same, empty background was used as a base for several Western blots, representing unrelated experiments. The bands appear to have been added in with a clone stamp tool or similar.

Figure 1 Open in figure viewer PowerPoint Comparing the shapes of individual bands from various submissions: Two pairs of bands taken from a FEBS Letters and a FEBS Journal submission, respectively. When overlaid in two separate colour channels, identical areas show up as yellow/grey, unique features show up as red and green.

Figure 2 Open in figure viewer PowerPoint These panels are taken from two unrelated submissions, one to FEBS Letters (on the left), one to FEBS Journal (on the right). The two manuscripts were submitted from two separate groups of authors working in different fields at different affiliations. Each of these panels depicts an entirely different experiment. The yellow frames mark distinctive areas to illustrate the duplication.

The background patterns and the shapes of the individual bands showed a high incidence of matches across these two clusters of manuscripts, which suggests that the Western blots in all of those manuscripts are highly likely to derive from the same source.

None of the manuscripts state that the experiments were outsourced; the name of the laboratory or company that provided the Western blots is not denoted.

This evidence points to serious, systematic and large‐scale fabrication of research results. It has come to our attention that in the meantime, three of these manuscripts were submitted to other journals (two of those submissions simultaneously with our journal!) and were published between March and June of this year. We have contacted and informed the respective journals of our concerns.

Research misconduct and violations of good research practice, and specifically the manipulation of scientific images, are a well‐known problem and regularly raise attention.

Cases like this confirm yet again the importance and obvious benefits of screening articles before publication. Our constant vigilance is a service to authors and the wider scientific community.

Bik et al. [1] screened over 20 000 papers published between 1995 and 2014 and reported inappropriate image duplication in the published literature to range at around 3.8% with at least half of those pointing to intentional manipulation. However, that study focused on duplications only, factoring out any other potential image manipulations. It might be reasonably assumed that the analysis contains a number of false negatives and that the true frequency of inappropriate figure preparation is in fact a lot higher than 4%.

At FEBS Press, we regularly flag up about 30% of accepted manuscripts for image‐related irregularities that require clarification. Around 95% of these cases turn out to stem either from naïve beautification issues, negligence, or genuine accidents, which can usually be rectified before publication. Around 2–3% of our formally accepted manuscripts, however, have their acceptance rescinded due to image integrity issues that call into question the scientific data presented.

The efforts of those authors who intentionally manipulate or falsify their research results are becoming increasingly sophisticated. In a highly competitive scientific environment, such questionable practices may appear to be winning strategies. Meanwhile, the scientific community is relentlessly looking at ways to prevent misconduct. Multiple initiatives are pursued by research institutes, funding agencies and journals alike to tackle this problem, and measures to safeguard research integrity are increasingly put in place. Scientific journals carry an obligation to be vigilant and take appropriate measures to combat and prevent plagiarism, falsification and fabrication from entering the literature [2, 3].

To this end, we point our readers to some clear guidelines for the preparation of scientific images before publication [4, 5]. Western blots, photographs and micrographs are not illustrations; they must be an accurate representation of what was observed in the respective experiment [2]. Images that have been illegitimately manipulated cannot reliably support or confirm the research results they represent.

We believe that prepublication image data screening is a vital service to the life sciences community at large. It is also financially more viable than generally understood, as overall it requires considerably less time and effort than investigations, corrections and, at worst, retractions of problematic published material [6].