Lonni Besançon is an Assistant Professor of Data Visualization at Linköping University whose research spans interactive systems and immersive ways of understanding complex data. Alongside this work, he has become widely known for his efforts to uncover fraudulent and questionable research practices, reporting hundreds of problematic papers and helping build collective initiatives such as the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides.

In this interview, he reflects on the challenges of being a science sleuth, the growing importance of collaborative integrity efforts, and what the research community can do to strengthen trust in science.

[SIA] Your main academic work is in data visualization and interactive systems, yet you’ve also dedicated significant time to uncovering research fraud and questionable practices. How did this parallel path in sleuthing begin, and what motivated you to take it on alongside your research career?

[LB] During my PhD, I focused on research methods, particularly data analysis and statistics. This aspect of my curiosity then expanded to include transparency and open science, (open) peer review, and the overall trustworthiness and reusability of research findings and methods.

[SIA] During the COVID-19 pandemic, you uncovered hundreds of flawed or fraudulent papers, many published unusually fast. What did that period reveal about vulnerabilities in scholarly publishing, and how has it influenced your sleuthing today?

[LB] During the pandemic, one institute in particular became very vocal in promoting hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). This was based on a paper that was peer-reviewed and published within 24 hours in a journal where some of the authors also held editorial roles. This paper had a breadth of issues related to data analysis and overall research integrity. The paper has been retracted, although the retraction took more than four years. But this prompted me to look into this group’s research output on COVID-19. I found that many of their papers had such a quick turnaround in journals that they had some editorial control over. I then automated this analysis to find a few hundred papers with such a quick turnaround. This was the beginning of my questioning of published papers, which then expanded into publishing rebuttals of methodologically weak or ideologically motivated papers with the help of scientists in different fields or from professionals outside academia who were also willing to devote their time to make sure that science is done right. This period has taught me that, unfortunately, peer review, as we know it, is insufficient and that we should stop considering peer review as a pre-publication step only, and rather continue considering it throughout the lifetime of a paper. Many exchanges with sleuths have further shaped this feeling and encouraged me to continue posting on PubPeer (for post-publication peer review) and arguing for a peer review reform.

So, while data visualization remains my main academic field, this investigative work became a parallel path: partly a civic duty as a scientist and partly a way to push for reforms in how we evaluate and trust scientific knowledge and researchers.

[SIA] Your work has sometimes drawn hostility, even threats, from those exposed. What personal or professional challenges have you faced as a result of this work, and what keeps you going in the face of such pushback?

[LB] It has indeed been the case, both from the authors of papers I criticized and from the general public, for two main reasons: The first reason is that the institute promoting HCQ has published hundreds of clinical studies with ethical and methodological concerns. With my co-author Fabrice Frank, we wrote a paper, and he has done a tremendous amount of work to highlight those issues. The institute now has a few dozen retractions and more than 100 expressions of concern. Unfortunately, HCQ was promoted by high-profile politicians, and my co-authors and I have received numerous comments calling us “Big Pharma shills” who are essentially “trying to kill people with the vaccine and removing a cheap drug from the possible treatments.” It’s all a conspiracy theory, of course, but I have been a target for a while now. The second reason is that I have criticized papers that seemed to be ideologically motivated to attack the vaccine or non-pharmaceutical Rx for COVID, which also angers a lot of people stuck in conspiracy theories.

All of this has led to a tremendous amount of stress both in my personal and professional life. People online threaten to try to find where my family lives or get me fired and insult me all day long. This is quite difficult to handle. You don’t want these things to affect your personal life or your professional output, and they unfortunately do. But this was also extra motivation to keep going. I must be doing something right for people and researchers to be willing and trying so hard to sabotage my efforts. One of the things that I had to spend a lot of time on was the attacks on all of my published papers to try to get them retracted. The reasons never hold up, but it still prompts investigations by the publisher. I spent a lot of time explaining that nothing was actually wrong in my published outputs.

[SIA] You are a contributor to the Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides (COSIG), which brings together leading figures in sleuthing such as Anna Abalkina, René Aquarius, Elisabeth Bik, and Jennifer Byrne. How important are collective efforts like COSIG, or joint actions such as United2Act against paper mills, compared to individual sleuthing? What makes these collaborations especially powerful?

[LB] This initiative led by Reese Richardson is, I think, particularly important. Our small number of sleuths is definitely not enough to face the challenge posed by paper mills and fraud in science. We need more collective action and for people to understand our work and how to do it better. COSIG is essential in achieving this goal. Ultimately, I believe that the only way to face and approach this challenge is to face it as a community of scientists working together, rather than with a few of us doing the research integrity work. Librarians are also a great help in this regard, and they tend to be more aware of these issues than most researchers are.

[SIA] In your investigations, you’ve often found recurring irregularities, such as repeated ethics approval numbers or duplicated data. With more tools and databases now available, which methods or technologies do you find most effective for detecting these issues, and which tend to be less useful or even misleading?

[LB] The Problematic Paper Screener is a great help in identifying a lot of papers with a variety of potential issues. ImageTwin.ai is another good tool to help identify image duplications in papers. These automated tools are definitely speeding up things, but they don’t do all of the work for us. It is important that their output and results are verified and confirmed by a human being independently before posting on PubPeer. However, these tools only identify the easy-to-catch misconduct, and more elaborate methods still evade us. Those require deeper investigations, which are extremely time-consuming.

[SIA] Recently, anonymous groups have targeted sleuths and others in post-publication peer review with vague accusations, public attacks, and even legal threats. What do these incidents imply for the future of post-publication peer review, and how can the community better protect those who expose misconduct?

[LB] This is unfortunately not new. Dr. Bik was the target of such a threat by the institute that promoted HCQ in France in 2021. In response, we then published an Open Letter to defend her and post-publication peer review, which was widely covered by Science and Nature. This SLAPP lawsuit was eventually killed by the public prosecutor, but these threats are a real stress for sleuths. Attacks from anonymous groups serve no other purpose than making sleuths feel targeted and bringing attention to science-denialists. Hundreds of threatening messages are directed at sleuths in some cases. This is clearly bullying behavior that can result in wasting time explaining ourselves to our institutions and colleagues to expose what these groups really are. Academic institutions have to be on top of such things. They should protect and value the work of sleuths. Institutional leaders should not cave in to the pressure of such ideologically motivated groups that are, in essence, simply trying to steer the conversation topic away from the problematic papers that the sleuths expose.

[SIA] If you had authority over one or two levers in academic publishing, peer review, or research funding, what reforms would you push first to make it harder for misconduct to thrive?

[LB] I would mainly highlight that metrics are ALWAYS gamed and that research evaluation/assessment should not rely on those. The day we manage to switch to a model where metrics do not matter, we are less likely to find such problematic practices.

In addition, I would change the definition of peer review to not only encompass pre-publication peer review. When we are made aware of a new paper being released that pertains to our research, we should include related work in a section of the manuscript. And let’s make it easier to publish rebuttals and responses to published papers in journals without all of the restrictive formatting and deadlines.

[SIA] Beyond the technical work of detecting problems, what cultural or structural changes in academia do you think would best support integrity, especially for early-career researchers under pressure to publish quickly?

[LB] I would ideally like us to move towards Slow Science. We should spend more time on our papers, making them as robust and reusable as possible. But that implies that we do not value metrics when evaluating scientists anymore.

I would also like for corrections and retractions to become the norm, and not just when something exceptional happens. As Dr. Bik, Heathers, Meyerowitz-Katz and myself wrote:

[SIA] At the Heidelberg Laureate Forum panel on scientific misconduct, you argued that “if you make a metric out of it, people will game that metric.” What do you think the research assessment reform movement, led by initiatives like DORA and COARA, needs to thrive in today’s metric-driven research ecosystem?

[LB] I have been a long-time fan of DORA for its ideas and ideals. But I am afraid that things are not changing. For things to change, we need all academics to be on board, to see the problems of misconduct and unreliable science that we have been highlighting for a long time now, and to get together and think about how we could address the problem. Both COARA and DORA are essential tools to arrive at a solution, but I would say that they are necessary but not sufficient. We need publishers to change as well, and they may not be really on board with this. In my field, I realized that things would not change fast enough, so I created a Diamond Open Access journal with my colleagues, which aims to experiment with different publishing, formatting, and reviewing models.

[SIA] Finally, what message would you like to convey to the readers of REACH about research integrity, openness, and the role of the community in protecting science?

[LB] If you care about good science being done in a reusable and trustworthy way, you are not alone. Surround yourself with those who care, and try to drive the change that you wish to see in science. If you find problematic papers, reach out to people who have been calling them out for a while to figure out what you can do without putting yourself or your career in danger.