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First thing's first:
Scanning electron microscopes are useful, so they're finding their way into more and more published articles. Across 50 journals' articles published 2010 through early 2023, this has been the trend:
Now remember the metadata in the OP? It's from a TESCAN MAIA3. You know, one of these big, expensive machines.
The label is automatically added to the image, and some older articles cut it off, but newer ones shouldn't.
If someone took the image in the OP and told us it was from a completely different microscope than the one we know it to be from, then it's misidentified.
Lots of papers do exactly that. That's a red flag.
In most of these cases, it's not just that the paper gets the name of the manufacturer of the microscope wrong but otherwise correctly identifies the microscope's model, it's also that the model is misidentified.
One of the authors who discovered these mistakes analogized this like so:
"It's like if you wrote all of your code in your manuscript in R and then you said we used Python for all software development."
You don't just make that sort of mistake!
Some of the papers made really bizarre misidentifications, like calling the Japanese brand Hitachi, "Czech", as if no one would notice they definitely did not own a Czech Hitachi microscope.
What makes all this evidence of malfeasance is that there are systematic misidentifications:
Some authors in diverse parts of the world make the same very unique mistakes in identifying their equipment.
Oddly, 54.6% of figures originated from Amirbakir University, despite authors lacking affiliations with that place, and it not being special in terms of microscopy equipment.
What this lines up with is that the articles were made by paper mills and they were probably fake.
So something is amiss, but how clear is the signal?
For me, it became exceedingly clear when I saw where the problematic articles came from. Guess before you look.
They overwhelmingly came from China, Iran, and India, places known for fraud. And U.S.-based fraud? International!
Amusingly, some of the careless researchers who thought they could get away with purchasing and misportraying SEM images had enough balls to do it really often.
The top fraudsters had loads of problematic articles. Eliminating these few would go a long way to fixing the problem.
Overall, out of some 11,314 articles where SEMs could be identified, 21.2% had metadata not matching manufacturer or model descriptions in the text, and that could indicate a massive problem with existing SEM-based evidence.
A good amount of it is probably fake.
This all comes from a really neat new preprint that's worth checking out: osf.io/preprints/osf/
I saw author comments here:
It's so funny how the investigation of science fraud is based on such rudimentary analyses, and it still is successful.
Unfortunately fraudsters with half a functioning brain do write papers, and those just get a "didn't replicate"
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Probably in reality brand of the microscope (scanning or otherwise) doesn’t *really* matter that much. Also having the volts, detector used, or amount of back scattering b versus secondary detector doesn’t matter.
It’s like looking at a mugshot and asking the photographer to
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Stupid question, but why would someone writing a fraudulent paper name a wrong microscope name?
Nice to see some effort for detecting fraud in the physical sciences! We often imagine that it's just a problem for social sciences, but "take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye"
One interesting idea I've seen is to actually have the microscopes encode image ID + checksum on a blockchain automatically, so you can take any image and compare to the record and see when it was scanned and if the image has been altered. For example:
One thing I’ll add (as a frequent SEM-user): the banner along the bottom is useful for predicting fraudulent research in another way. It’s lazy to leave it on (vs cropping and adding your own scale bar) so it indicates low quality research.
Also, cool paper (go Northwestern!)
Most SEM instruments allow you to modify or save without the banner. Also, almost all papers in the physical sciences crop the banner and make their own scalebar because the manufacturer’s is the wrong font which looks tacky. TEM is same. Use Digital Micrograph and you’ll see.
This a really great thread and topic! I definitely think instrument misidentification runs rampant across fields....I've had clients tell me that they don't know what instrument they used 
and ask why model/manufacturer/country of origin needs to be mentioned in the methods. 
and ask why model/manufacturer/country of origin needs to be mentioned in the methods. 
Oof, and here I thought materials science was more trustworthy. Ah well, so much for THAT idea.
Interesting piece from 2021 in the BMJ, the level of medical research fraud is simply staggering.
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There is too much logically wrong with this thread to take this seriously. Whoever suggested to you that mis-identifying SEM equipment is tantamount to mis-identifying whether python or R was used in analysis should never be taken seriously again. Jfc.
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I wonder how much of every, "Ozempic also fixes X!" finding is just "Not being overweight also fixes X!" with an extra step.
There’s no such thing as “hoarding wealth” in our system. What you’re thinking of is the opening to the 1987 animated show “Ducktales,” and it’s portrayal of a large vault of gold coins.
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Ryan
@Ryncor2
Replying to @memeticsisyphus
What do you think happens when a small percentage of families hoard a large percentage of wealth?
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