Category: neuroscience retractions

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.

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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.

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

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: 

Continue reading Neuroscience journal retracts eight articles for image distortion

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. 

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

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: 

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

A brain tumor researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, has retracted a paper from Science Translational Medicine, and is a co-author on an article that another journal is examining. 

The problems in both papers, and several others with shared authors, came to light via comments on PubPeer by Elisabeth Bik and a pseudonymous commenter. 

The Science Translational Medicine paper, “A subset of PARP inhibitors induces lethal telomere fusion in ALT-dependent tumor cells,” was published last May by a group led by Russell O. Pieper, director of basic science in the UCSF Brain Tumor Center and vice-chairman of the UCSF department of neurological surgery. The paper has been cited six times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. 

Continue reading Brain tumor researchers retract paper from Science journal

A Science journal has issued expressions of concern for two papers on Alzheimer’s disease over concerns about the integrity of the data. 

One involves a 2016 article by a star-studded group of neuroscience researchers over allegations of manipulated data in one of the figures. That paper, “Gain-of-function mutations in protein kinase Cα (PKCα) may promote synaptic defects in Alzheimer’s disease,” appeared in Science Signaling and  came from a team led by Rudolph Tanzi  and Roberto Malinow, of Harvard and UC San Diego, respectively.

Here’s the notice for the paper, which has been cited 64 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science: 

Continue reading Papers on Alzheimer’s slapped with expressions of concern

A former postdoc at Stony Brook University who was moonlighting in a different lab has lost a study after a university investigation found issues with the work, including “overlap” with prior grants and an earlier study that her supervisor had published, as well as misreported data.

The supervisor — neuroscientist Joshua Plotkin, who was the complainant in the investigation — said that the study was published without his permission, according to an email seen by Retraction Watch. The former postdoc, Catarina Cunha, has denied wrongdoing and called the investigation a “witch hunt,” claiming that the university ignored her exculpatory evidence and that the paper’s findings are valid and original. 

Continue reading Bad blood at a lab leads to retraction after postdoc publishes study without supervisor’s permission

Arizona State University is investigating two former faculty members suspected of falsifying data in several of their papers.

The inquiry centers on Antonella Caccamo and Salvatore Oddo, who recently lost their 2016 article in Molecular Psychiatry, a Nature journal, titled “p62 improves AD-like pathology by increasing autophagy.”  

Caccamo once held a research appointment in the ASU-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center. Oddo, also worked in the center, where he was an associate professor. 

While at ASU — including Banner Health — Oddo received more than $11 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was co-PI on grant from the National Science Foundation worth more than $220,000. Caccamo received one grant from NIH, in 2018, totaling roughly $543,000. 

According to the retraction notice: 

Continue reading Arizona State investigating data anomalies in work by two former neuroscience faculty members

A prominent sleep researcher whose work has come under intense scrutiny has lost a paper for duplication, aka self-plagiarism.

Matthew Walker, of UC Berkeley, is the author of Why We Sleep, a bestselling treatise on the many woes of fatigue. Instantly popular, it was touted everywhere, from Bill Gates to The New York Times, which enthused: 

Continue reading High-profile sleep researcher loses paper for duplication