Elsevier’s Journal of Chemical Neuroanatomy has retracted eight articles for image manipulation. 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.
The retractions come after the journal’s founding editor and former editor in chief Sir Harry W. M. Steinbusch stepped down in January of this year.
Kingsley Afoke Iteire, a vice-dean and senior lecturer at the University of Medical Sciences in Ondo, Nigeria, and the corresponding author of one of the retracted papers, told that one of his co-authors used PowerPoint to resize the offending images, but this shouldn’t have distorted them. Replacing the images instead of retracting the paper would have been a better decision, Iteire said, and he speculates the previous editor wouldn’t made as harsh a decision.
The corresponding author of another paper, Mohammad Ali Azarbayjani, a professor of exercise physiology at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran, Iran, said he had not made “any changes or manipulations” to the flagged images, which were obtained from methods carried out by the external lab Histogenotech. Azarbayjani said he “had no role in its implementation, and I took the results from the laboratory and adjusted the article based on the report of that laboratory.”
The corresponding authors of the other retracted papers did not respond to our requests for comment. Yang is more concerned about a paper that hasn’t yet been retracted by the journal, which she says contains “heavy” image manipulation.
