Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik (born 1966) is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant. Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications, and identifying over 4,000 potential cases of improper research conduct. Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest, a blog with daily updates on microbiome research, and the Science Integrity Digest blog.
Bik was awarded the 2021 John Maddox Prize for "outstanding work exposing widespread threats to research integrity in scientific papers".
Contents
Early life and education
Bik was born in the Netherlands. She studied at the Utrecht University, where she obtained her MSc degree and subsequently a PhD in 1996, both in microbiology. Her dissertation was about developing vaccines for new strains of Vibrio cholerae involved in cholera epidemics across India and Bangladesh. She conducted her doctorate and her postdoctoral studies at the molecular microbiology department in the National Institute of Health and the Environment in Bilthoven.
Career
Public sector
After receiving her doctorate, Bik worked for the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment and St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein, where she organized the development of new molecular techniques for identifying infectious agents.
Academia
In 2001, Bik moved to California to work at Stanford University in the laboratory of David Relman, where her work focused on human microbiomes, previously unidentified microbial species in them, and their diversity across individuals. Her work explored other mucosal microbiomes, confirming that the human oral microbiota contains distinct genera from the gut microbiota.
While at Stanford, Bik worked on an Office of Naval Research project to study the microbiome of dolphins and sea lions in San Diego. She found that their microbiome was distinct from other mammals, and influenced by the sea they lived in.
Private sector
In 2016, Bik left Stanford to work for uBiome, a biotech company involved in the sequencing of human microbiomes, before leaving the company in 2018 to work full-time on analyzing scientific papers for image duplication and other malpractices.
Science integrity
Bik started to focus on science integrity in 2013, when she discovered that one of her publications had been plagiarised. In January 2014 she found images in papers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine that had been duplicated and Photoshopped, leading her to dedicate her free time to look for further manipulation in scientific publications.
In 2014, she started the blog Microbiome Digest, where she provided easy-to-understand commentaries on recent scientific papers. The blog soon became a success, and Bik enlisted help from her colleagues on Twitter to manage the content. She is also an active contributor to Retraction Watch and PubPeer, highlighting scientific papers that present falsified, duplicated, and questionable data, such as in western blot images.
Together with Arturo Casadevall and Ferric Fang, Bik published an mBio paper investigating the prevalence of these questionable practices within published scientific papers, where they found nearly 400 papers with intentional figure manipulation (i.e. about 800 duplicate images). She estimates half of these were created with the intention to mislead. Her investigations have exposed significant levels of scientific misconduct in several journals.
In 2019, Bik announced via Twitter that she was taking a year off paid work to investigate scientific misconduct, the subject on which she co-authored a preregistered test suggesting that "academic culture, peer control, cash-based publication incentives and national misconduct policies", but not pressure to publish, may affect scientific integrity, with nationality being a stronger predictor than individual attributes. Her analysis of 960 recent papers published in Molecular and Cellular Biology found that 59 (6.1%) contained inappropriately duplicated images, from which 5 papers were subsequently retracted and 41 papers had corrections published, and led to a pilot image screening program at the journal identifying problems with 14.5% of subsequent submissions.
In February 2020, Science reported that Bik had identified over 400 research papers published in China over the previous three years, apparently all originating from the same research paper mill company providing full service production of articles describing fake research for medical students on demand. Bik said, "students in China need to have a paper published to get their MD, but they do not have time to do research, so that is an unrealistic goal."
Awards
Bik received the following awards:
November 2020: the Peter Wildy Prize by the Microbiology Society for communication of microbiology in education and to the public.
2021: the John Maddox Prize for "outstanding work exposing widespread threats to research integrity in scientific papers".
2021: the Ockham Award for Skeptical Activism by The Skeptic magazine.
July 2023: the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science commendation award.
2024: included on the STATUS List by STAT News in recognition of her work as a scientific integrity analyst and her expertise in scientific image analysis.
November 2024: Einstein Foundation Individual Award for research integrity.