Only half joking, but have you ever had the issue on a Mac where you copy something and it randomly fails to copy, so when you paste, it pastes the previous copy?

Easy to imagine, slack that it did not get seen.

(I think the bug is at least 15 years old).

Seems to happen a lot when I'm pasting in/out of a browser; not sure if that's the same issue, or one further augmented by Firefox? :)

Or if you have 20 files in a folder called IMG0887.jpg, IMG0897.jpg, etc, and you need to open them one after the other with an open file dialog, easy to pick the wrong one. A scientist isn't necessarily IT smart, particularly in medicine. Not saying it's what happened though.

Hence I'm hammering in the importance of good data handling and clearly identified file structure to the (chemistry) grad students working in the lab with me

wait it does not happen just to me? is it widespread? I thought I was going mad or my keyboard starting to break down!

No it's not just you. There was an Apple ticket with thousands of 'me too', but they said it does not exist and deleted the whole thing about 10 years ago.

With multiple people working on a paper, some junior, some senior, tight deadlines, and last minute changes, honest mistakes are certainly possible.

Paper figures are usually hand assembled using Adobe Illustrator or similar, which can be error prone.

For instance, placeholder images might have been added during drafting, and they were not later replaced.

So my assumption is the figures must be vital data filled figures. If they're just diagramatic ones (fig 1 type) that are similar amongst articles from the same group on thr same line of work then it's probably plagiarism by the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law.

Even figures with images are typically assembled in Illustrator.

You past in the image of your cells or western blot or whatever, and then add all the labels etc.