Addressing Research Misconduct and Unintentional Image Issues
Academic institutions recognize the importance of maintaining the highest standard of image integrity in their scientific publications. Even though academic research publishing provides peer-review processes, image issues such as reuse from published manuscripts, duplication within a manuscript, alteration, manipulation, and even AI-generated images remain widespread, often because these issues are not checked with the appropriate tools.
It's estimated that about one in three life sciences manuscripts submitted for publication are flagged for some kind of image-related issue. These problems are often unintentionally overlooked because issues are very difficult to spot with the naked eye. As a result, academic institutions are at risk of submitting manuscripts with image inaccuracies.
Many institutional stakeholders experience this challenge. Anyone — from presidents and deans for research and integrity, to heads of department and technology purchasing officers in libraries and resource centers — are all partners in integrity protection.
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What are the consequences?
When investigating image integrity errors, we typically find that most turn out to be honest mistakes. While unintentional, failure to identify these breaches prior to submission for publication can severely damage an institution's reputation.
If an article is published with unresolved image issues, it might be identified and highlighted by peers in the academic community, through social media or on platforms like PubPeer.
Reports of issues can lead to very costly investigations and retractions. Misconduct investigations can cost anywhere up to one million dollars. As well as the cost, retractions cause enduring damage, not just to the individual researcher/s, but to the entire institution's reputation. This can significantly impair the researcher or institution’s ability to obtain funding in the future.
How Proofig AI Assists Research Institutions and their Office of Research Integrity?
Proofig AI was created with research teams and institutions in mind. Our advanced AI tools for researchers provide comprehensive support to ensure the authenticity and quality of your scientific publications. By offering solutions like AI generated images detection and image quality assurance, Proofig AI helps institutions uphold high standards in academic research publishing.
Proofig AI also provides tailored solutions for researchers, robust tools for publishers, and support for research ethics committees, ensuring integrity at every level of scientific research
Proofig AI is the Ultimate AI Tool for Researchers That:
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Seamlessly integrates into a researcher’s existing pre-submission process to automate image checks.
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Identifies and analyzes sub-images, flagging potential errors to help researchers address and prevent issues before manuscript submission.
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Supports the manuscript submission protocol for researchers, departments, and entire institutions prior to submission, preventing the risk of mistakes and potential manuscript rejection.
Researchers and their institutions benefit from:
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Automatic and Fast Analysis: Proofig AI, an advanced AI tool for researchers, can analyze a large number of images quickly, providing detailed reports in minutes.
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Comprehensive Detection: While academic research publishing provides standard review processes, Proofig AI offers advanced detection of issues like AI-generated images, duplication, and intricate manipulations, ensuring the authenticity of your research.
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Supports the Office of Research Integrity: By offering robust detection tools, Proofig AI aids the Office of Research Integrity in monitoring compliance and promoting ethical research practices within the institution.
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Confidential and Secure: All analyses are conducted on private, secure servers, ensuring the confidentiality of your research data and compliance with academic research publishing standards.
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Integration with Workflow: Proofig AI seamlessly integrates into your existing pre-submission process, acting as an essential AI tool for researchers to reduce the risk of retractions.
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Considerable Time and Effort Savings: Minimizes the risk of research misconduct allegations and post-publication critiques, saving valuable time and resources for research teams and departments.
By utilizing these advanced capabilities, Proofig AI ensures that research institutions can maintain the highest standards of image integrity in their scientific publications.
How does it work?
Proofig AI leverages advanced machine learning techniques and an extensive database to ensure the integrity of scientific images by identifying various forms of image issues.
1. Upload Your Manuscript
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Researchers begin by uploading their PDF manuscript to the Proofig platform. The system extracts all images and sub-images from the manuscript for analysis.
2. Analyze for Integrity Issues with Advanced AI Tools for Researchers
Proofig AI analyzes the manuscript for multiple types of image issues:
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Detection of Reuse from Published Manuscripts: By accessing PubMed’s Source database, which contains tens of millions of images, Proofig can identify reused sub-images, commonly known as plagiarism.
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Duplication and Reuse Within a Manuscript: Proofig identifies duplication or reuse of sub-images within the same manuscript. This includes detecting instances of scaling, rotation, flipping, full and partial overlap, ensuring each image is unique.
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Alteration and Manipulation: The system detects alterations or manipulations within a single sub-image, such as cloning, editing, deletion, and splicing, ensuring the authenticity of each sub-image.
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Detection of AI-Generated Images: Proofig AI identifies images created by the most widely used AI model. Proofig is committed to continually evolving and expanding its feature set to include new models, ensuring we stay ahead in the race to protect scientific integrity. Take Our Quiz To Test Yourself
3. Validate and Review Results to Prevent integrity issues
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Researchers can check the detected sub-images and validate the results. Reviewing any suspected issues flagged by Proofig AI helps you prevent research misconduct and address unintentional integrity issues before submission. This collaborative effort supports the Office of Research Integrity's mission to ensure ethical research practices are maintained throughout the institution.
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The system highlights suspected integrity issues, allowing researchers to add only relevant findings to the final report. Proofig also provides advanced further investigation tools to help users make well-informed decisions.
4. Generate a Comprehensive Report
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Proofig AI processes your selections and generates a comprehensive report in minutes. This report provides detailed documentation of any issues found, helping you address them proactively
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The report helps in ensuring the integrity of the scientific images before submission.
Using Proofig's AI Tools for Researchers: Four Simple Steps to Check Your Manuscript
Data Privacy and Security
At Proofig, we prioritize the privacy and security of our users' data. We want to make it unequivocally clear that:
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Training Data: Our system is trained exclusively using material we have developed and open-source content designated for commercial use, ensuring compliance with legal and ethical standards.
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User Data: We do not use any data from user-uploaded manuscripts to train our models or algorithms. User-uploaded data is analyzed solely to detect image integrity issues within the submitted manuscript and generate the corresponding report.
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Confidentiality: All analyses are conducted on private, secure servers. Your manuscripts and reports remain fully confidential and are not used for any other purposes.
By adhering to these strict data privacy and security protocols, Proofig ensures that your data is protected while maintaining the highest levels of integrity analysis in compliance with academic research publishing standards.
Proofig AI is trusted by leading publishers, research institutes, and researchers
Discover how Proofig AI is advancing Research integrity on our homepage
“Image integrity issues in the scientific literature are more prevalent than many readers would expect, and notably so in the life sciences. In recent years, an increasing number of scientific journals have adopted pre-publication image screening. Expertise in this area has developed, whilst the need for reliable and user-friendly automated tools to screen large volumes of image data at scale has grown accordingly.
I have found Proofig to be impressively strong in detecting duplications and part-duplications in Western blots and microscopy images. It works fairly quickly and reliably across several figures, whilst being robust to rotation, flipping, resizing, and colour changes. The makers recently also added Flow Cytometry plots to their catalogue of screen-able image types.
The system automatically generates a report summarizing individual, selectable findings in a clear manner, and users can also re-visit previously screened items in their own database. Whilst it remains essential for an experienced user to verify and interpret individual findings, I believe Proofig is a very valuable tool for duplication detection, and suited to effectively assist journals’ image integrity screening routines”.
Jana Christopher
Image Data Integrity Analyst
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