A group of neuroscientists in Germany and Hungary is calling for the retraction of two of their recent papers after discovering a fatal error in the research.
Myriam Sander, a memory researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, took to social media on Wednesday to alert her followers to the decision. In what Sander called the “most difficult tweet ever,” she wrote:
A researcher at the center of questions about a biotech’s controversial experimental treatment for Alzheimer’s disease has lost five papers in PLOS One.
The journal says it is retracting the articles, by Hoau-Yan Wang and colleagues, over concerns about the integrity of the data and the images in the papers. Wang does not agree with any of the retractions.
As we’ve reported, Wang, of the CIty University of New York, helped conduct the studies that formed the backbone of the regulatory filing for the drug simufilam, which Cassava Sciences — formerly Pain Therapeutics — has been trying to bring to market. Cassava, according to a citizen’s petition to the FDA, has funded Wang’s lab for more than 15 years, and two of the now-retracted papers feature Lindsay Burns, a Cassava employee, as a co-author. (The citizen’s petition, which called on the FDA to halt Cassava’s trials, was filed by a law firm representing Cassava short sellers but eventually denied by the FDA because it was not an appropriate venue.)
Cureus has retracted 15 papers, including three on Covid-19, after concluding that the articles were produced in a scheme by a researcher in Pakistan who charged his co-authors to join the manuscripts, lied about the ethics approval for the studies and may have fabricated data.
The journal says Rahil Barkat, who already had lost a pair of articles in Cureus, charged researchers – some in Pakistan, others elsewhere – “editing fees” of as much as $300 to proofread and sign on to his manuscripts.
Barkat’s name appears on a few of the now-retracted articles but not all. However, the journal has linked him to the 15 papers.
Ask Shetal Shah. In 2000, Shah, now a professor of pediatrics at New York Medical College’s Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital, in Valhalla, published an essay in JAMA about a young medic providing care to indigenous people in Alaska.
Titled “Five Miles From Tomorrow,” the piece focused on the narrator’s encounter with a wizened 97-year-old Yupik man
A Lancet journal has retracted and replaced a 2021 paper on the treatment of pancreatic cancer over an error that prompted an institutional investigation.
According to the journal, after publication readers notified the editors about potential problems with the data – in particular, apparent issues with the survival curves in study. In October 2021, the journal published a letter to the editor by a group in Japan detailing the concerns and stating that:
The authors of a 2021 Nature paper on how climate change might affect the amount of evaporation from the earth’s land surface have retracted the article after learning of a crucial error in their analysis.
The crux of the paper, titled “A 10 per cent increase in global land evapotranspiration from 2003 to 2019,” was the finding that:
Variability in global land evapotranspiration is positively correlated with El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The main driver of the trend, however, is increasing land temperature. Our findings provide an observational constraint on global land evapotranspiration, and are consistent with the hypothesis that global evapotranspiration should increase in a warming climate.
In other words, according to the authors – from a pair of NASA labs in California and Maryland – the rate of evapotranspiration over that 17-year-period was twice as high as previous estimates. As the lead author, Madeleine Pascolini-Campbell, said in this press release (Wayback Machine link) from NASA:
Science has issued an expression of concern for a 2014 paper on the harmful effects of ocean acidification on fish and coral after the first author of the article was accused of fabricating data in the study and other research.
The work – cited 171 times so far, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science – received immediate challenge from other researchers, who questioned the validity of the findings.
Carine06 from UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A Springer Nature journal has retracted a 2021 article with dire news for mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park about the prospects of extinction on the spikes of SARS-CoV-2 after finding a fatal error in their model of the outbreak.
The article, “Exploring the potential effect of COVID-19 on an endangered great ape,” appeared in October in Scientific Reports and was written by a group at the University of Southern Denmark and the the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, in Atlanta. The Fund has been concerned – for good reason – about the potential of respiratory illnesses to decimate populations of great apes, whose social nature can foster transmission of infections.
A case of author’s remorse immediately after publication of her paper has the editor of the journal calling “bullshit” on the decision to retract the work.
Shortly after publication, the named first author, Antonia Phillip, contacted the journal to repudiate the paper. According to the retraction notice, dated January 14:
A paper that was the subject of a four-page correction in 2018, and which helped inform a now-halted clinical trial of a drug for lung cancer, has been retracted following an institutional investigation concluded that one of the researchers had falsified the data in that article and at least four others.
And we have learned that Springer Nature should be acting on a different article by the researcher shortly, and has just begun an investigation of yet another.
The PNAS article, which appeared in 2015, was written by Takashi Nojiri, formerly of Osaka University and the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Research Institute, in Japan. As we reported in June, an August 2020 report from National University Corporation Osaka University and National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Hospital concluded that Nojiri committed:
