At Scholarly Kitchen, digital media analyst Phill Jones tackles the problem of photoshopping in research journals:

Last year, the National Institutes of Health and the field of neuroscience were rocked, once again, by a serious science fraud case that revolved around image manipulation. Dr. Eliezer Masliah, formerly director of the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging, was fired for systematically fraudulently manipulating research images over a quarter of a century. While the scale of the damage done is not easy to measure, we know that researchers trying to build on Dr. Masliah’s work have gone down blind alleys, unwittingly wasted perhaps millions in research funding, and at least one drug went through expensive clinical trials, but was not approved in several countries, because its efficacy is highly questionable.

“Tackling Science’s ‘Nasty Photoshop Problem’,” March 20, 2025

He quotes many other examples, noting that if you have the time and patience to search Retraction Watch and PubPeer, you can find more yourself.

Digital manufacturers starting to respond

Stricter guidelines, he says, are becoming more common but they vary across publishers and journals. In an interesting development, digital equipment makers are getting in on the act too:

The most interesting example I’ve seen is Cytiva, which is part of global life sciences company Danaher, where they are already producing gel and blot scanners and biomolecular imagers that sign images with an encrypted hash. The images can be verified as original using free software that can be downloaded from their website. ‘Nasty Photoshop Problem’

That’s a considerable help, no doubt, because false accusations of photoshopping can also harm the integrity of the system.

Jones himself is working on a technical solution. But he foresees that elements used in the criminal justice system being adapted to science:

An eventual system could involve the signing of images in a similar way to how secure web pages are signed, which could then be verified by a publisher or potentially an institution doing an investigation. A good analogy for anybody who’s seen a police drama might be the chain of custody used by the criminal justice system that provides documentation of where evidence came from, who handled it and what they did with it. ‘Nasty Photoshop Problem’,

It’s telling that criminal justice methods of evidence management should be necessary in a scholarly science system. But that at least protects the honest majority of researchers.