Hundreds of cancer papers mention cell lines that don’t seem to exist

Hundreds of cancer papers mention cell lines that don’t seem to exist

Finding could be an indicator of paper mill activity

Research integrity sleuths may have found a new red flag for identifying fraudulent papers, at least in cancer research: Findings about human cell lines that apparently do not exist. That’s the conclusion of a recent study investigating eight cell lines that are consistently misspelled across 420 papers published from 2004 to 2023, including in highly ranked journals in cancer research. Some of the misspellings may have been inadvertent errors, but a subset of 235 papers provided details about seven of the eight lines that indicate the reported experiments weren’t actually conducted, the sleuths say.

“Unfortunately, this just looks like a massive invention of data and experiments that probably never happened,” says study lead author Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher and data sleuth at the University of Sydney. Some of the nonexistent cell lines have already been cited in literature reviews and could confuse and mislead scientists conducting similar studies, she adds. “It’s a hell of a mess.”

Chao Shen, a cell biologist at Wuhan University and deputy director of the China Center for Type Culture Collection, a repository of human cell lines, hopes the findings gain attention. “These revelations underline the urgent need for concerted efforts to address the challenges posed by [these] cell lines to research integrity and reproducibility,” such as standardized reporting of cell lines, he says.

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https://www.science.org/content/article/hundreds-cancer-papers-mention-cell-lines-don-t-seem-exist