Legal threats, online trolls and low pay: the world of scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik
Chemistry World catches up with one of the world’s leading scientific integrity experts
Elisabeth Bik doesn’t regret becoming a scientific sleuth who catches researchers behaving badly for a living. That’s despite her recently facing legal threats from two bioscientists in France – prosecutors in Marseille just concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge her.
In a previous life, she was a microbiologist at the University of Stanford in California for 15 years. After that, she worked in industry for two years before deciding in 2019 to go it alone in the world of research integrity.
She now publishes a blog, Science Integrity Digest, and regularly posts her findings on X, formerly Twitter, and PubPeer, a site where scientists discuss papers.
Dalmeet Singh Chawla caught up with Bik to find out more.