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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

#6 Junjie Yu, Youyi Lu, et al. "miR-200b suppresses cell proliferation, migration and enhances chemosensitivity in prostate cancer by regulating Bmi-1" Oncology Reports (2014) 10.3892/or.2013.2897 pubmed: 24317363 submitted here: pubpeer.com/publications...

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

#5 cross-paper image reuse, submitted to pubpeer. The 2014 paper caption says the image shows "EGFP expression in pAcISUBC transfected BuMECs" pAcISUBC is a human insulin expression vector constructed in the 2014 paper that does not appear in 2013 paper. 10.1007/s11033-014-3464-3 PMID: 24969480

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

#4 International Journal of Molecular Sciences 13(7):8514-8539 (2012). 10.3390/ijms13078514 There is a duplicated region across cells that received different treatments. The fluorescence patterns are almost identical, although some spots on the 2nd row do not appear in the first row. 🧐🤔

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

#3 "Aberrant expression and constitutive activation of STAT3 in cervical carcinogenesis: implications in high-risk human papillomavirus infection" Molecular Cancer (2010) 10.1186/1476-4598-9-282 There is a duplicated region across two different staining conditions. pubpeer.com/publications...

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

#2 "Permissive role for mGlu1 metabotropic glutamate receptors in excitotoxic retinal degeneration" Neuroscience (2017) 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2017.09.005 There is a duplication across figures that correspond to 2 different mouse strains - C57BL/6J and BALB/c. (All these submitted to PubPeer)

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

THREAD OF IMAGE DUPLICATION FINDINGS (will be continually updated) #1 Nature Medicine 18, 892–901 (2012). 10.1038/nm.2772 The cells in Fig. 1 are described as from a human patient, while the matching cells in Fig. 6 are described as from a tumor grown subcutaneously in a mouse from human cells.

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

0.5 % is well below @elisabethbik.bsky.social's 2016 finding of 3.8% in biomedical papers (journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...). Most likely we are not catching a lot. I'll be iterating on the system to try to improve it. We plan to eventually open source it so people can use it themselves! (3/3)

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Metascience Observatory Founder @delton.bsky.social carefully went through the findings along with biology/neuroscience expert Greg Fitzgerald, PhD. We submitted 4 PubPeer comments so far and will post a 5th soon. It looks like final count will be 5/1000 or 0.5%. We'll now iterate on system.. (2/3)

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

We ran our simple image duplication detection system on 1,000 papers. The papers 1. have 1 author who has a image-related retraction according to @retractionwatch.com, 2. are not retracted, and 3. have no image-related @pubpeer.com comments. We use AI to screen findings & suppress false pos.. (1/3)

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Three different AIs were asked to predict how AI might impact science. This was one of the scenarios they arrived at - "The Slop Singularity". (ai-will-do-science.surge.sh) We don't think it will get quite so bad, but something along these lines is happening. AI will help in the end.

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

AI for metascience is booming, and @lukaswallrich.bsky.social and the huge volunteer team at the superb @forrt.bsky.social project are hosting this very timely online conference. Metascience Observatory Founder @delton.bsky.social will be speaking Sept 28-30 along w/ 33 other speakers. Link 👇

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The fraud problem in science, summarized. This is part of our motivation for building the Forensic Metascience Agent, a AI agent orchestration system designed to enable a thorough audit of a scientific paper, including images, tables/data, statistics, and supplementary files. (🔗 w/ more info below)

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

We believe PubPeer can re-invigorate scientific self-criticism. “PubPeer exists & thrives precisely because of a frustration, shared by its initiators and its users, at the failures of traditional scientific institutions to administer well-organised scepticism.”-Wytske et al. osf.io/preprints/me...

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The Metascience Observatory @metascienceobs.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Yesterday we published a detailed report about what we've learned so far from our replication database about reproducibility and correlates of reproducibility. => open.substack.com/pub/moreisdi...

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