A team of neuroscientists from Sweden has retracted their 2013 paper in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity after discovering that they’d made a mistake while merging their data.
According to the abstract, the study, “Lower CSF interleukin-6 predicts future depression in a population-based sample of older women followed for 17 years,” purported to find that: Continue reading Doing the right thing: Team finds data merge error in depression paper, retracts
The Journal of Neuroscience has retracted a 2012 paper by a group from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet for what appears to be research misconduct. But more on that in a moment.
The article, “The Existence of FGFR1-5-HT1A Receptor Heterocomplexes in Midbrain 5-HT Neurons of the Rat: Relevance for Neuroplasticity,” came from the lab of Kjell Fuxe, whose interests include Parkinson’s disease, addiction and depression. The first and second authors, Dasiel Oscar Borroto-Escuela and Wilber Romero-Fernandez, are listed as being post-docs in the lab.
According to the notice: Continue reading Journal of Neuroscience retracts plasticity paper for “substantial data misrepresentation”
For the second time inside of a week, we come to praise scientists who did the right thing when they realized their lab equipment or reagents weren’t performing as expected.
Here’s the retraction of a 2011 paper in Cerebral Cortex: Continue reading Scientists doing the right thing: Malfunctioning lab equipment leads to retraction of neuroscience paper
Last October, Anica Klockars, a neuroscience researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden, and a colleague published a controversial comment in the journal Small GTPases, a Landes Bioscience title.
The title of the letter was meant to provoke: “Scientific yellow journalism.”
As the authors wrote: Continue reading Charge of “scientific yellow journalism” has supervisor seeing red, leads to retraction
Blood has retracted a 2012 paper by a pair of Swedish authors, one of whom appears to have misappropriated data from his mentor.
The article, titled “Microparticles are the basic storage units for different proteins in platelet granules,” appeared online in July 2012 and was written by Chi Zhang and Yang Yang, of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
But as the retraction notice explains, there was a problem:
The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine has retracted a 2008 article on smoking cessation by a group from Sweden which they had published not many months before in a different journal.
The retracted paper was titled “Quitting smoking is perceived to have an effect on somatic health among pregnant and non-pregnant women.” The authors, from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, had published a similar paper — “Perception of Smoking-Related Health Consequences among Pregnant and Non-Pregnant Women” — in the American Journal of Addictions in 2007.
How similar?
A difficult authorship dispute, involving two journals and at least two continents, has led to an Expression of Concern in the Brazilian Journal of Rheumatology.
Here’s the Expression of Concern: Continue reading Bitter authorship issues prompt Expression of Concern in rheumatology journal
The Journal of Psychiatric Research is retracting a 2010 paper claiming to show a relationship between quetiapine (Seroquel) and certain lab tests and brain scans, after it turns out the brain images were either unreliable or invalid.
Here’s the notice for “Relationship between dopamine D2 receptor occupancy, clinical response, and drug and monoamine metabolites levels in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid. A pilot study in patients suffering from first-episode schizophrenia treated with quetiapine”: Continue reading Journal retracts antipsychotic study when all subjects’ PET scans turn out to be unreliable or invalid
On Tuesday, we covered a retraction in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) involving zalutumumab, a compound once being developed for treatments of head and neck cancer. As we noted at the time, the authors decided to retract the paper because they no longer trusted the method they used. One of the authors didn’t sign the notice, and we’ve now heard from her about why.
First, a comment from lead author Paul W.H.I Parren, who tells Retraction Watch: Continue reading PNAS author explains why she didn’t sign retraction notice for potential anti-cancer drug study
There’s another non-unanimous retraction in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week, and this one involves an anti-tumor antibody that may not be what the authors originally thought it was.
According to the notice for “The antibody zalutumumab inhibits epidermal growth factor receptor signaling by limiting intra- and intermolecular flexibility:” Continue reading Another non-unanimous PNAS retraction, for potential anti-cancer drug, after company’s method proves unreliable