basic life sciences retractions

Undisclosed conflicts, lightning-fast peer review: One Alzheimer’s journal’s role in a failed drug

Retraction Watch readers are likely familiar with the work of Charles Piller, an award-winning investigative reporter who has been covering problematic research in neuroscience and other fields for Science. We’re pleased to offer an excerpt of his new book, Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s, which publishes today.

The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease (JPAD) seems authoritative and looks prestigious. Its sponsors are Springer, a division of Springer Nature, one of the largest scientific publishers, and the annual Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease Congress—a major, global scientific meeting. Many doctors rely on JPAD when deciding whether to prescribe amyloid-reducing drugs such as Leqembi, or others to fight agitation or anxiety that can accompany Alzheimer’s dementia.

Matthew Schrag first raised an eyebrow about the journal in August 2021 while examining possible misconduct in studies behind Cassava Sciences’ simufilam for the citizen petition to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The prior year, JPAD had published a paper by Cassava’s Lindsay Burns and Hoau-Yan Wang that suggested strong potential for the drug. It said simufilam lowered key biomarkers associated with Alzheimer’s—particularly tau proteins—in the spinal fluid of patients who were volunteers for the company’s clinical trial. That paper helped boost confidence in Cassava and simufilam.

Cancer researcher admitted faking data

A former researcher at Nemours Children’s Health in Wilmington, Del., admitted to falsifying and incorrectly reporting data in at least two published studies, both of which were supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. The studies have been retracted.

The researcher, Valerie Sampson, reported herself to Nemours, which launched an inquiry into all of her publications, according to a hospital spokesperson. The institution’s findings are under review at the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Sampson left Nemours in January 2022 after 16 years with the hospital, according to her LinkedIn profile. She also held a position as an affiliated scientist at the University of Delaware, a role that ended in the same month, per the profile. Six months following her departure from Nemours, Sampson took a position as a scientist at WuXi Advanced Therapies in Philadelphia, a company specializing in cell and gene therapies, for a little over a year. She is currently unemployed, according to the profile.

Neuroscience journal retracts eight articles for image distortion

Elsevier’s Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy has retracted eight articles for image manipulation and overlap, with more on the way, according to the sleuth who notified the publication of the issues.

Each retraction notice credits an “anonymous reader” with having raised concerns about manipulated or duplicated images, with the journal’s editor in chief determining a retraction was warranted.

That anonymous reader was Mu Yang, an assistant professor of neurobiology at Columbia University, in New York City, who started emailing the journal about problematic papers in January 2023.

On May 16th, the journal notified Yang of the following retractions:

‘We should have followed up’: Lancet journal retracts article on hearing aids and dementia after prodding

When Jure Mur, a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, realized the replication of a published study he was working on as a “sanity check” wasn’t producing matching results, his first reaction was “annoyance,” he said.

He assumed the mistake was his own, and he’d have to thoroughly check his work to find it. “Only after double- and triple-checking my code did I start suspecting an error in the original paper,” Mur told Retraction Watch.

Mur emailed the authors of the article several times, but they never responded to him, he said. He next contacted the editors of The Lancet Public Health, which had published the original paper, “Association between hearing aid use and all-cause and cause-specific dementia: an analysis of the UK Biobank cohort,” in April 2023.

Journal retracts 31 papers, bans authors and reviewers after losing its impact factor

A journal that lost its impact factor and spot in a major index this year has made good on a promise to retract dozens of papers with “compromised” peer review.

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified signs of citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations. Clarivate also dropped Genetika from its Web of Science index for failing to meet editorial quality criteria.

Clarivate’s actions followed a blog post by scientific sleuth Elisabeth Bik about what she called the “Iranian Plant Paper Mill, which included 31 papers published in Genetika.

Guest post: Genomics has a spreadsheet problem

Surveys show spreadsheets are the most widely used analytical tool in academic research. But they are prone to errors. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Public Health England lost 16,000 test results after using an old Excel file format to handle data. Whether this mix-up hampered local infection control is anybody’s guess, but it certainly could have.

The software is causing trouble for other lines of research, too, as our team and others have shown: Genomics studies that rely on Excel spreadsheets to manage data turn out to be riddled with erroneous gene names, or gene-name errors, and the issue is affecting more and more journals.

Journal to retract papers that cost its impact factor and spot in leading index

A journal that didn’t get an impact factor this year after Clarivate, the company behind the closely-watched but controversial metric, identified unusual citations in several articles will retract the offending papers, according to its editor.

Genetika, a publication of the Serbian Genetics Society, did not receive an updated impact factor in Clarivate’s 2023 Journal Citation Reports due to citation stacking, a practice in which authors or journals seem to trade citations, also known as “citation cartels” or “citation rings.”

Specifically, Clarivate identified five papers published in Genetika in 2021 that had been cited by 22 papers published in the journal Bioscience Research in 2022, Snezana Mladenovic Drinic, the editor of Genetika, told Retraction Watch. Clarivate also suppressed Bioscience Research this year, meaning that the journal did not receive a new impact factor either.

“Unapproved euthanasia” of rats in neuroscience study leads to retraction

A 2017 paper describing neuroscience research with rats has been retracted after “data mis-management,” including the mistreatment of the animals, came to light.

The retracted paper was the second by Subimal Datta, a professor of psychology and anesthesiology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to receive a flag for data problems.

The article, “BNDF heterozygosity is associated with memory deficits and alterations in cortical and hippocampal EEG power,” was published in Behavioural Brain Research and has been cited 14 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

The retraction notice, published March 31, stated:

Paper co-authored by controversial Australian journalist earns expression of concern

One more paper co-authored by Australian health journalist Maryanne Demasi has earned an expression of concern for image duplication.

The move comes seven years after the journal Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) was first made aware of potential problems with a figure in Demasi’s paper that showed Western blots. It marks the third time one of the former researcher’s scientific publications has been officially flagged as concerning or retracted.

Demasi, who earned her PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2004, has been in the news recently after she did a controversial interview with the lead author of a Cochrane review that cast doubt on face masks. She has drawn frequent rebuke over the past decade, beginning with a 2013 program in which her reporting questioned statins. She and her co-authors told us in 2018 that they believe her work as a journalist made her research a target of criticism.

‘Kafkaesque nightmare’: Judge wants researcher reinstated as NIH grant PI after med school’s misconduct finding

A federal judge has denied a request for a preliminary injunction by a breast cancer researcher at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn who sued the university last year after an institutional investigation determined that she committed research misconduct.

However, the judge noted “troubling aspects of this case that bear on serious public health concerns” – namely the discontinuation of the scientist’s research – and also expressed concern about SUNY Downstate and the NIH’s treatment of her.

As we’ve previously reported, Stacy Blain, an associate professor of pediatrics and cell biology at SUNY Downstate, has alleged the university discriminated against her for decades because of her sex, and that the investigation’s finding of misconduct was the result of retaliation after she complained of the discrimination.

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