A team of electron-microscopy scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is facing allegations of data manipulation and research misconduct that reach back 13 years, according to a report in today’s Boston Globe. The newspaper reported that the journal Nature had published a strongly worded correction of a 1993 paper involving electron-microscope analysis that was written by researchers under the direction of Stephen Pennycook, the leader of the Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Group in the laboratory’s Condensed Matter Sciences Division. “Key data were misrepresented by the authors, both during the review process and in the final published version of the paper,” stated a correction that appeared in the November 9 issue of Nature.

According to the newspaper, that correction apparently coincided with a new allegation involving another paper at a sister journal of Nature. In a review of the paper, which was submitted this year to the journal Nature Physics by scientists working in the same group at Oak Ridge, the anonymous reviewer stated that there was “direct, incontrovertible evidence for systematic data manipulation and scientific misconduct in this manuscript.” In an interview with the Globe, Mr. Pennycook admitted that there were mistakes in the presentation of data in both papers, but stated that the mistakes did not vitiate the papers’ conclusions.