20 Facts About Elisabeth Bik

Elisabeth Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest, a blog with daily updates on microbiome research, and the Science Integrity Digest blog.

Elisabeth Bik was awarded the 2021 John Maddox Prize for "outstanding work exposing widespread threats to research integrity in scientific papers".

Elisabeth Bik studied at the Utrecht University, where she obtained her MSc degree and subsequently a PhD in 1996, both in microbiology.

Elisabeth Bik's dissertation was about developing vaccines for new strains of Vibrio cholerae involved in cholera epidemics across India and Bangladesh.

Elisabeth Bik conducted her doctorate and her postdoctoral studies at the molecular microbiology department in the National Institute of Health and the Environment in Bilthoven.

In 2001, Elisabeth 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.

Elisabeth Bik's work explored other mucosal microbiomes, confirming that the human oral microbiota contains distinct genera from the gut microbiota.

Elisabeth Bik found that their microbiome was distinct from other mammals, and influenced by the sea they lived in.

In 2016, Elisabeth 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.

Elisabeth Bik started to focus on science integrity in 2013, when she discovered that one of her publications had been plagiarised.

Elisabeth Bik decided to dedicate her free time to looking for questionable practices in scientific publications, and specialized in tracking down image manipulation in studies.

The blog soon became a success, and Elisabeth Bik enlisted help from her colleagues on Twitter to manage the content.

Elisabeth Bik is an active contributor to Retraction Watch and PubPeer, highlighting scientific papers that present falsified, duplicated, and questionable data, such as in western blot images.

Elisabeth Bik estimates half of these were created with the intention to mislead.

Elisabeth Bik is active on Twitter, where she posts potentially duplicated figures for her more than 114,000 followers to investigate.

Elisabeth Bik's investigations have exposed significant levels of scientific misconduct in several journals.

In 2019, Elisabeth 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.

In February 2020, Science reported that Elisabeth 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.

In September 2021, Elisabeth Bik discovered repetitive elements in published images that indicated digital tampering by authors of a paper by the controversial Comet Research Group claiming the discovery of the Biblical Sodom, and evidence that it had been destroyed by a cosmic airburst.

Citizen4Science linked a petition denouncing the harassment of scientists and defenders of science integrity, specifically mentioning Elisabeth Bik and calling on French authorities to intervene and journalists to look into the matter.