Why is Image Integrity Important in Scientific Publishing?
As one Journal of Clinical Investigation editorial clearly states: “Data accuracy forms the foundation of the scientific enterprise, and without it, the enterprise risks crumbling.” (1)
In scientific publishing services, ensuring image integrity is paramount. While most publishers review manuscripts to ensure they include reliable information, image integrity issues—such as duplications, manipulations, reuse from published manuscripts, alterations, and AI-generated images—are very difficult to detect. These issues can compromise the quality of published research.
If manuscripts are published with integrity issues, it can lead to costly investigations, damaging the reputations of the publishers. The impact factor rankings of the journals are also affected, reducing the public’s trust in scientific research.
What Kind of Image Integrity Software Services Does Proofig AI Offer to Academic Publishers?
We’ve developed a cutting-edge AI solution for the automatic identification of scientific image issues pre and post publication tailored for academic publishers. Proofig AI can detect:
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Full duplications, including scaling or rotating
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Partial duplications or overlapping
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Flipped images, rotations, cloning
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"Paper mill" derived fraudulent manuscript images
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AI-generated images
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Reuse from published manuscripts by accessing PubMed’s Source database
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Any combination of these issues
Proofig is committed to continually evolving and expanding its feature set to include new models, ensuring we stay ahead in the race to protect scientific integrity. Our solution helps academic publishers meet the stringent standards required by top scientific journals.
While Proofig AI supports publishers with advanced tools, we also offer solutions for researchers, research institutions, and research ethics committees , addressing a wide range of image integrity challenges.
How Does Proofig Benefit Academic Publishers, from Emerging to High-Impact Journals?
Proofig provides publishers with a game-changing pre-publication solution for ensuring each image in thousands of manuscripts is reliable. By detecting image integrity issues, Proofig helps maintain the quality and credibility of publications, which is essential for emerging to high impact journals. Ensuring the integrity of published research supports the reputation of the journal and fosters trust within the scientific community.
With Proofig, publishers can:
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Analyze a large number of images within minutes
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More easily identify fraudulent manuscripts derived from paper mills
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Automate screening of articles to find image duplications, manipulations, and AI-generated images
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Reduce human image identification errors
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Protect a journal's reputation and impact factor
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Significantly reduce time and costs associated with image proofing
By maintaining the quality and credibility of publications, Proofig helps publishers uphold the standards of high impact journals, which can positively influence their impact factor rankings over time.
How does Proofig work?
Proofig AI leverages advanced machine learning techniques and an extensive database to ensure the integrity of scientific images by identifying various forms of image integrity issues.
Publishers can check each manuscript, confidentially and automatically, in four simple steps:
1. Upload Your Manuscript
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Publishers begin by uploading their PDF manuscript to the Proofig platform. The system extracts all images and sub-images from the manuscript for analysis.
2. Analyze for Integrity Issues
Proofig AI analyzes the manuscript for multiple types of image issues:
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Detection of Reuse from Published Manuscripts: By accessing PubMed’s Source database, which contains tens of millions of images, Proofig can identify reused sub-images, commonly known as plagiarism.
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Duplication and Reuse Within a Manuscript: Proofig identifies duplication or reuse of sub-images within the same manuscript. This includes detecting instances of scaling, rotation, flipping, full and partial overlap, ensuring each image is unique.
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Alteration and Manipulation: The system detects alterations or manipulations within a single sub-image, such as cloning, editing, deletion, and splicing, ensuring the authenticity of each sub-image.
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Detection of AI-Generated Images: Proofig AI identifies images created by the most widely used AI model. Proofig is committed to continually evolving and expanding its feature set to include new models, ensuring we stay ahead in the race to protect scientific integrity. Take Our Quiz To Test Yourself
3. Validate and Review Results
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Publishers can check the detected sub-images and validate the results. They can then review any suspected issues flagged by Proofig AI.
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The system highlights suspected integrity issues, allowing publishers to add only relevant findings to the final report. Proofig also provides advanced further investigation tools to help users make well-informed decisions.
4. Generate a Comprehensive Report
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Proofig AI processes the selections and produces a comprehensive report in minutes. The report includes both a page view of the suspected issue and a detailed view of each confirmed issue.
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The report helps in ensuring the integrity of the scientific images before publication.
The Role of Image Integrity in Impact Factor Rankings
Image integrity plays a significant role in a journal's impact factor ranking. High-quality, reliable research attracts citations, which contribute to a higher impact factor. By preventing the publication of manuscripts with image integrity issues, Proofig helps publishers maintain and potentially improve their impact factor rankings. This, in turn, enhances the journal's reputation and influence in the scientific community.
Visit the homepage to explore Proofig’s full suite of services for advancing scientific research integrity.
Data Privacy and Security
At Proofig, we prioritize the privacy and security of our users' data. We want to make it unequivocally clear that:
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Training Data: Our system is trained exclusively using material we have developed and open-source content designated for commercial use, ensuring compliance with legal and ethical standards.
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User Data: We do not use any data from user-uploaded manuscripts to train our models or algorithms. User-uploaded data is analyzed solely to detect image integrity issues within the submitted manuscript and generate the corresponding report.
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Confidentiality: All analyses are conducted on private, secure servers. Your manuscripts and reports remain fully confidential and are not used for any other purposes.
By adhering to these strict data privacy and security protocols, Proofig ensures that your data is protected while maintaining the highest standards of image integrity analysis.
Proofig AI is trusted by Academic Publishers, Top Impact Journals, Research Institutes, and Researchers
Discover how Proofig AI is advancing Research integrity on our homepage
Learn more in our FAQ about peer-reviewed articles, and see pricing options for our AI research tool .
Who uses Proofig AI already?
Academic publishers and top impact journals around the world trust Proofig AI for its advanced image integrity solutions. Our clients include integrity position holders from top universities and prominent international publishers such as AAAS (Sience journals, Springer Nature, AACR, SAGE Publishing, RSC, JCI, Taylor & Francis. Proofig AI has been quoted in Nature and by COPE as a leader in the field of image integrity.
Where can I find out more?
Contact us to schedule a short introductory session.
Hear what renowned editors and scientists are saying about Proofig:
"Significant damage is caused by image duplication even when they are innocent mistakes. Therefore, I'm happy to provide my department with the peace of mind that comes with knowing our manuscripts' images have been properly verified pre-publication using Proofig, and only manuscripts with no mistakes will follow for publication".
Professor Ofer Mandelboim
Head of the Department of Immunology and Cancer Research
Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine, Israel
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