Social psychologist Diederik Stapel has notched his 58th retraction, after admitting he fabricated data in yet another article.
He’s holding onto his 4th place spot on our leaderboard.
This latest retraction is for “Correction or comparison? The effects of prime awareness on social judgments,” published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. As usual for Stapel, this paper has been retracted because he fabricated data.
Here’s the note:
The above article from the European Journal of Social Psychology, published online on 17 February 2009 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), and in Volume 39, pp. 719-733, has been retracted by agreement between the authors, Marcus Maringer and Diederik A. Stapel, the journal Editors in Chief, Radmila Prislin and Vivian Vignoles, and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed upon following the admission of Diederik A. Stapel that this article contained data that he had fabricated. The first author was unaware of his actions and not in any way involved.
The paper has been cited once, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
This isn’t the first time co-author Marcus Maringer, a researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, has had a paper retracted as a result of Stapel’s fabrications. We reached out to Maringer to see if he had anything to add.
Last we heard from Stapel, he admitted to sockpuppeting on our blog.
Hat tip: Rolf Degen
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Should be the default be to just notify everyone on all his papers of pending retractions unless someone steps forward to argue otherwise? Give it a few weeks and retract everything not contested.
Aside from being primarily accountable as the first author, I assume they mean.
By the way, is it reasonable that Maringer, who apparently was ‘not in any way involved’ in the data collection, could be the first author?
Exactly!
Order-of-authorship conventions are not the same in all research communities: in mine the default is alphabetical, with no assumption that an author who is first in an alphabetical listing has any greater responsibility or any special role. We should not be so quick, knowing as little as we do, to disparage Stapel’s co-authors.