Kristin Roovers was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a trusted member of a research lab at the medical school studying the role of cell growth in diabetes. But when an editor of The Journal of Clinical Investigation did a spot-check of one of her images for an article in 2005, Roovers’s research proved a little too perfect, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

The image had dark bands on it, supposedly showing different proteins in different conditions. “As we looked at it, we realized the person had cut and pasted the exact same bands” over and over again, Ushma Neill, the journal’s executive editor, tells the paper. In some cases, a copied part of the image was flipped or reversed to make it look like a new finding. “The closer we took a look, the more we were convinced that the data had been fabricated or manipulated in order to support the conclusions.”

As computer programs make images easier than ever to manipulate, editors at a growing number of scientific publications are turning into image detectives, examining figures to test their authenticity. And the level of tampering they find is alarming, the paper writes. “The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal,” Hany Farid, a computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with journal editors to help them detect image manipulation, tells the paper.

Ten to 20 of the articles accepted by The Journal of Clinical Investigation each year show some evidence of tampering, and about five to 10 of those papers warrant a thorough investigation, according to Neill. The journal publishes about 300 to 350 articles per year.

The alterations made by Roovers were “very easy” to do, says Richard Assoian, a professor of pharmacology at Penn who worked with the young researcher and served as her mentor while she was a doctoral student at the University of Miami. “It’s basic Photoshopping,” he tells the paper.

Roovers admitted that she used the software, though she says she was not the only one in the lab to do so. “I certainly did something wrong, but I don’t think I was alone in the whole thing,” she tells the paper, adding that it was not her intent to deceive. “It was trying to present it even better.”

“Only a few journals are doing full image screening,” Mike Rossner, executive director of Rockefeller University Press, tells the paper. He became a leading crusader for such checks after he accidentally stumbled upon manipulated images in an article submitted to The Journal of Cell Biology six years ago, when he was the publication’s managing editor.

Rossner worked with researchers to develop guidelines for the journal outlining proper treatment of images, and several other journals have since adopted them. Some enhancements are actually allowed - such as adjusting the contrast of an entire figure to make it clearer. But adjusting one part of an image is not permitted, because that changes the meaning of the data, the paper writes.

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Hat tip to PharmaGossip