Direction: Read the given passage below and answer the questions.
Publishing papers through plagiarism is on the wane in India with almost all journals checking for plagiarism at some stage before papers get published. So, now, Indian researchers seem to have gained expertise at another kind of fraud — manipulating images, producing images by repeatedly using certain portions in one frame and reuse of images in the same paper or from those published earlier. Or probably, Indian researchers manipulated images the same way they used plagiarised content. Only that papers with manipulated images are now being exposed as more researchers based outside India have started looking for them. At last count, 73 papers published between 2004 and 2017 by scientists at the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (CSIR-IITR), Lucknow have serious problems with the images. The final numbers might be way higher if one were to critically look at all papers published by scientists at IITR during the last 20-25 years.
All the 73 papers have been posted on the Pubpeer website by independent researchers who have an eye to spot image manipulation and duplication, something that peer-reviews seem to have failed to spot at the time of reviewing the manuscripts. Leading the pack with 40 problematic papers is Dr. Yogeshwer Shukla, a senior scientist at IITR. In a blog post in For Better Science, Smut Clyde has exposed Dr. Shukla's unethical practices in about 25 papers. In an email, Dr. Shukla says: “It may please be noted that for reasons other than originality the papers are now appearing in Pubpeer. I have also been informed that this information of Pubpeer is addressed by a committee at our institute to verify authenticity.” While not denying that the problems cited on Pubpeer, over telephone he says: “We are hurt. I admit that unintentional mistakes might have been made. There was no way to check if the images have already been used in other papers. This is done just to create doubts about Ayurveda and to target someone. A committee is looking into it and we will clarify each and every query raised by the committee.”
A pattern with problematic papers, there is a pattern to the kind of manipulation that IITR researchers seem to resort to. Manipulated and reused Western Blots are the most common. They are also a little harder to spot. The most common practice is to duplicate bands of Western Blot for completely different experiments mostly in the same paper and at times in other papers. “Western blots are the most common types I see in papers with photographic images and those are also the ones I seem to find the most,” Dr. Elisabeth M. Bik, Science consultant at Harbers-Bik LLC, San Francisco, California says in an email. Dr. Bik has an eye for manipulated images and has caught tens of papers.