Article Summary: "Widespread misidentification of scanning electron microscope instruments in the peer-reviewed materials science and engineering literature"

Objective:
This is a research article summarizing a systematic, semi-automated analysis of how frequently scanning electron microscope (SEM) instruments are misidentified in published materials science and engineering (MSE) papers, assessing its scope, patterns, and possible causes.

Key Points

Background

• Reliability Concerns: Although MSE fields are assumed reliable, other disciplines have faced reproducibility crises.
• Emerging Issue: Users on PubPeer identified many MSE articles where SEM make/model in the text does not match metadata in published images.
• Potential Impact: Such misidentification may suggest broader flaws (e.g., mass-producers of fraudulent research or "papermills").

Methodology

• Data Collection:

  • Surveyed 1,067,108 articles (2010–early 2023) from 50 journals (Impact Factor 2–24).
  • Focused on journals allowing data mining, covering various publishers (especially Elsevier).

• Automated Pipeline:

  • Scanned captions for SEM-related terms to identify 174,046 articles likely to contain SEM images.
  • Extracted figures and used Tesseract OCR to find manufacturer/model from image "banners."
  • Compared extracted info to SEM details reported in article text.

• Manual Verification:

  • Manually checked extracted data due to OCR/automation limitations.
  • Validated pipeline's false positive and negative rates by examining random samples.

• Additional Analyses:

  • Investigated connection between SEM misidentification and other scientific errors (e.g., incorrect Tauc plot interpretation for bandgap estimation).

Main Findings

• Prevalence of Misidentification:

  • For 11,314 articles with readable SEM banners, 21.2% had image metadata mismatching the SEM identified in the text.
  • 24.7% did not report the SEM manufacturer/model at all.
  • Only 54% correctly matched image and text information.

• Pipeline Performance:

  • Low false positive rate (0.7% on random sample).
  • High false negative rate (missed many known problematic articles due to image/resolution limits).

• Impact and Patterns:

  • Articles with SEM misidentification were ~1.8–3.2 times more likely to have PubPeer comments about improprieties.
  • Higher rates of critical errors in Tauc plot analyses (optical bandgap estimation).
  • Misidentification articles had slightly higher citation counts.

• Systemic Characteristics:

  • Certain keywords (e.g., "nanocomposite," "green," "chitosan") enriched in titles of misidentification articles.
  • Some authors published many misidentified articles (up to 54.2% of their articles with SEM images).
  • Institutions from Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq overrepresented among misidentification cases; Chinese, U.S., S. Korean, Japanese authors underrepresented relative to all SEM-paper authors.
  • Instances of shared image/text patterns suggest coordinated authorship or papermill activity.

Limitations

• Image resolution and availability constraints likely lead to underestimates.
• Supplementary materials were not included, potentially missing some data.
• National/institutional reporting or publishing practices could bias results.
• Author name disambiguation (especially with romanization) is challenging.

Recommendations & Conclusions

• Call to Action: The widespread misreporting of SEM instruments highlights the need for stricter standards in reporting, displaying, and archiving metadata and higher-resolution images.
• Signatures for Fraud: SEM misidentification serves as a tractable marker for potentially problematic or fraudulent MSE articles.
• Need for Community Effort: Publishers, researchers, and editors should use available image metadata, improve standards, and look for paper-mill indicators to increase the integrity of the scientific record.

Technical & Supporting Information

• Detailed data tables (journals, term lists, annotations, figures).
• Open code resource provided: github.com/amarallab/sem_images
• Acknowledgement of funding and detailed author contributions.

References

• Includes landmark studies on reproducibility, image manipulation detection, and methodological standards in SEM and optical analysis.

Citation: Richardson RAK, Moon J, Hong SS, Amaral LAN (2025) "Widespread misidentification of scanning electron microscope instruments in the peer-reviewed materials science and engineering literature." PLoS One 20(7):e0326754. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0326754