Ulrich Lichtenthaler, the management professor at the University of Mannheim who has already retracted six papers for statistical irregularities, has another retraction for his CV.
Here’s the notice, from Organization Science:
The article “Not-Sold-Here: How Attitudes Influence External Knowledge Exploitation” (Organization Science (2010) 21(5):1054–1071, DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1090.0499) is being retracted after an assessment that the work violates INFORMS publication standards in two important respects. First, the citation to highly related prior work by the first two authors is quite incomplete. As a result, it was not possible to assess the novelty of the work. In addition, there is reason to believe that key results in the paper would not hold if variables included in this related work had been incorporated into the analysis.
Note. This statement of the retraction differs from the print version to be more precise.
We don’t have access to the print version of the journal, but if any readers do and can tell us how the notices differ, we’d appreciate it.
The paper has been cited 19 times, according to Google Scholar, including by several other Lichtenthaler studies.
Hat tip: “Roll”
It’s worth quoting an older notice from the Research Policy journal because the current one is a bit crap:
” the author failed to disclose (through specific citations, or through a mention in the ‘acknowledgements’ section, or in a covering letter to the Editor) the existence of other closely related papers by the same author. In the absence of this information, the referees and editors involved in handling these two Research Policy papers were misled as to the level of originality of each Research Policy paper. If they had been aware of those parallel papers, they would almost certainly have concluded that each of the two papers in question did not represent a sufficiently substantial and original contribution to knowledge in its own right to merit publication in a leading journal like Research Policy.
….the author has been inconsistent in his treatment of variables. In particular, variables treated as important in the 2009 Research Policy paper are disregarded in another parallel paper (in R&D Management 2009), and vice versa. In the case of the 2010 Research Policy paper, when it is examined in conjunction with three other closely related papers (in Journal of Product Innovation Management 2009, Strategic Organization 2009, and Organization Science 2010), there seems to be an omitted variable bias problem that would invalidate the conclusions of the Research Policy 2010 paper. In both cases, this raises severe doubts as to the validity and robustness of the conclusions drawn in the two Research Policy papers (and indeed in the other parallel papers).”
In other words it’s not just a matter of forgetting to cite prior work
JBV RETRACTED: Externally commercializing technology assets: An examination of different process stages. This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and Author.
The author contacted the Editor-in-Chief about statistical irregularities in this article in July 2012. The Editor-in-Chief thoroughly investigated this article and other preceding papers from the same database. On this basis, the Editor-in-Chief made the decision to retract the paper. The grounds for retraction are an error in statistical analyses, an omitted variable bias, and a “new” measure that was not “new” because it was already used in Lichtenthaler, U. and Ernst, H., Res. Policy, 36 (2007) 37–55, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2006.08.005. These errors undermined the review process and are too substantial for a corrigendum.
I know this is an older post, but I just checked the retraction notice in the printed journal (23(6), if that’s what you’re referring to), and it appears to be the same as the notice listed above.