Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant. Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications, and identifying over 400 research papers published in China from a "paper mill" company. Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest, a blog with daily updates on microbiome research, and the Science Integrity Digest blog.
In 2001, Bik moved to California to work at Stanford University in the laboratory of David Relman, where her work focused on human microbiomes, previously unidentified species in them, and their diversity across individuals. Her work explored other mucosal microbiomes, confirming that the human oral microbiota contains distinct genera from the gut microbiota. While at Stanford, Bik worked on an Office of Naval Research project to study the microbiome of dolphins and sea lions in San Diego. She found that their microbiome was distinct from other mammals, and influenced by the sea they lived in.
Private sector
In 2016, 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.
Science integrity
In 2014, she started the blog Microbiome Digest, where she provided easy-to-understand commentaries on recent scientific papers. The blog soon became a success, and Bik enlisted help from her colleagues on Twitter to manage the content. She is also an active contributor to Retraction Watch and PubPeer, highlighting scientific papers that present falsified, duplicated, and questionable data, such as in western blot images. Together with Arturo Cassadevall and Ferric Fang, Bik published an mBio paper investigating the prevalence of these questionable practices within published scientific papers, where they found nearly 400 papers with intentional figure manipulation. She estimates half of these were created with the intention to mislead. Bik is active on the social media micro-blogging platform, Twitter, where she posts potentially duplicated figures for her more than 60,000 Twitter followers to investigate. Her investigations have exposed significant levels of scientific misconduct in several journals. In 2018, Bik was featured on the pop science podcast "Everything Hertz." In 2019, Bik announced via Twitter that she was taking a year off paid work to investigate scientific misconduct, the subject on which she coauthored 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. Her analysis of 960 recent papers published in Molecular and Cellular Biology found that 6.1% contained inappropriately duplicated images, about 10% of which were retracted, and led to a pilot image screening program at the journal identifying problems with 14.5% of subsequent submissions. In February 2020, Science reported that Bik had identified over 400 research papers published in China over the previous three years, apparently all originating from the same "paper mill" company providing full service production of articles describing fake research for medical students on demand. Bik said, "students in China need to have a paper published to get their MD, but they do not have time to do research, so that is an unrealistic goal." In March 2020, commenting on the publication of the results of a clinical trial by Didier Raoult on the effect of hydroxychloroquine against COVID-19, she identified a conflict of interest and strongly criticized the methodology of the study. The learned society that owns the journal in which the results were published admitted that the publication was not at the level expected by the society, in particular due to a lack of justification of the criteria for patient selection and triage. However, the society rebutted allegations of a conflict of interest, stating that the peer review process prior to publication was respected because Jean-Marc Rolain, being one of the co-authors of the article and editor of the journal, did not participate in the evaluation. The publisher Elsevier then announced an additional independent evaluation to determine whether the concerns about the article were well founded.
