Since the early 2010s, scientific journal editors have grown accustomed to receiving emails from someone calling herself Clare Francis, who highlights problems in scientific articles and suggests deeper investigations into potential misconduct. One of her recent targets was Gregg Semenza, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, who has already had a dozen papers retracted for image manipulation. The name Clare Francis also appears frequently in comments on PubPeer, a website where people can post critiques and notes about articles that has established itself as a central forum for reporting research misconduct. But despite all her hard work, nobody knows who she is. A Wikipedia entry states that Clare Francis is a pseudonym used by one or more people whose “real identity, gender, and occupation remain secret,” who gained notoriety in the world of scientific publishing for an “uncanny knack for seeing improperly altered images, as well as smaller flaws that some editors are inclined to ignore.”
It has taken some time, but the work of misconduct detectives—whether anonymous figures like Francis or those who use their real names—has begun to receive public recognition. Recently, the email account used by Francis to correspond with journal editors received a message from the publisher Frontiers about an article in which she had pointed out ethical anomalies. The editors asked if they could credit her as the source of the report that led to the retraction. The idea was to acknowledge her in the retraction notice—the official statement declaring a paper invalid. “Once investigations are complete, the third party is informed of the outcome and, if a retraction is to be published, offered the option to be recognized in the notice with a standardized statement,” a Frontiers spokesperson told the website Retraction Watch. The publisher adopted this practice last year across all of its 200-plus journals. Francis, however, preferred to remain out of the spotlight and asked that the notice attribute the report only to “a concerned reader.”
Frontiers is not alone with the initiative. Publishers such as Springer Nature and Wiley are updating their editorial policies with the aim of recognizing the contributions of whistleblowers. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is also revising its retraction guidelines to pave the way for public recognition of whistleblowers—if they want it. Holden Thorp, editor in chief of Science, said the journal would like to acknowledge the work of these sleuths, but the authors of retracted articles and their institutions generally oppose it. “If we can fall back on a COPE guideline that allows us to put that in there [the names of the whistleblowers], we’ll definitely start doing it,” Thorp told a committee of the National Academy of Sciences, according to Retraction Watch.
The news was also welcomed by many investigators who, unlike Francis, do not hide their identities. “It might also help forge a more positive relationship between sleuths and publishers,” said neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, professor emeritus at the University of Oxford, UK, and an expert in scientific integrity, according to Retraction Watch. It is true that the relationship has often been tense. Anonymous reports can make editors uncomfortable if they do not understand the whistleblower’s motivations. Another point of friction is that misconduct sleuths often go to the media or post online about editors they feel are downplaying incidents or choosing not to investigate their allegations. Dorothy Bishop has made a name for herself by tracking down and exposing problematic scientific work. “Some scientists get a kick out of this work, but I definitely don’t. I always feel a bit sorry for exposing people, for making them clarify, respond, or retract,” Bishop told The Transmitter website in 2023.
Another prolific misconduct detective, Kazakh mathematician and software engineer Alexander Magazinov, stresses that anonymity should always be respected when requested. “It is extremely important not to disclose the third party’s name if they don’t explicitly consent to that,” he told Retraction Watch. Magazinov was one of the creators of the Problematic Paper Screener, a tool that identifies articles containing “tortured phrases”—nonsensical wording that can signal disguised plagiarism or fabricated studies. In March, his name appeared in the acknowledgments of a retraction notice for a paper published in Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience after he revealed evidence of manipulation during the peer-review process.
Misconduct sleuths can face lawsuits, and not all whistleblowers are willing to expose themselves to that risk. In a recent case, three researchers behind the Data Colada blog raised US$600,000 through crowdfunding to cover legal costs in a defamation lawsuit filed against them by Francesca Gino, a behavioral scientist later dismissed from Harvard University for misconduct. In 2023, the bloggers accused Gino of manipulating data in four articles. Last year, a judge dismissed Gino’s claims against Data Colada.
There have even been court battles over the right to anonymity itself. Ten years ago, the PubPeer website was sued by oncologist Fazlul Sarkar, a former researcher at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, who had more than 40 articles retracted for data falsification after being reported by users of the site. Sarkar wanted to know the identity of the anonymous users who suggested he had used fraudulent images in scientific papers, with particular interest in one whistleblower who had also alerted his university by email—Clare Francis. A judge initially sided with Sarkar, but PubPeer appealed and a Michigan court ruled that anonymous reporting was protected under US law.
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