It's dubious that a lot of the papers citing this paper are actually drawing conclusions based on this paper. Per Derek Lowe [1]:
> I could be wrong about this, but from this vantage point the original Lesné paper and its numerous follow-ups have largely just given people in the field something to point at when asked about the evidence for amyloid oligomers directly affecting memory. [...] The expressions in the literature about the failure to find *56 (as in the Selkoe lab’s papers) did not de-validate the general idea for anyone - indeed, Selkoe’s lab has been working on amyloid oligomers the whole time and continues to do so.
It's interesting that Lowe said this:
>When I review a paper, I freely admit that I am generally not thinking “What if all of this is based on lies and fakery?” It’s not the way that we tend to approach scientific manuscripts. Rather, you ask whether the hypothesis is a sound one and if it was tested in a useful way: were the procedures used sufficient to trust the results and were these results good enough to draw conclusions that can in turn be built upon by further research?
I have, over time, come to treat every paper I read as being based on lies and fakery (or incompetence, unconscious bias, or intentional omission of key details), and I work to convince myself that the paper is not fradulent or false. That is, my null hypothesis is that published work is wrong.
After chattiing with many people about this, I've found that most people default ot believing a paper is right and if the figures and conclusion agree with their bias, they just move on, beliving the paper to be true. I've been guilty of this in the past as well.
> I could be wrong about this, but from this vantage point the original Lesné paper and its numerous follow-ups have largely just given people in the field something to point at when asked about the evidence for amyloid oligomers directly affecting memory. [...] The expressions in the literature about the failure to find *56 (as in the Selkoe lab’s papers) did not de-validate the general idea for anyone - indeed, Selkoe’s lab has been working on amyloid oligomers the whole time and continues to do so.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/faked-beta-amyloid...