A humanities journal has retracted an article about the controversial theory of parental alienation after receiving legal threats from a group that supports the concept.
On May 19, the Integrated Journal for Research in Arts and Humanities (IJRAH) removed a review article by Robert Keith Head suggesting the theory of parental alienation is unsupported by research and fails “to meet basic validity requirements for psychological constructs.”
The move came after the Parental Alienation Study Group (PASG) — which describes itself as an international, nonprofit membership organization dedicated to the study and understanding of parental alienation — accused the journal of publishing “scientific fraud” and demanded the journal retract the paper or face legal action. The journal said the removal was not dictated by “external demands or threats” but followed a “comprehensive secondary evaluation” by its editorial board and independent psychometric experts who identified “critical methodological and structural flaws that undermined the paper’s scientific validity.”
“Following these internal findings, our editorial team engaged in a direct, thorough conversation with Mr. Head to address these granular scientific and data-verification concerns,” Raghvendra Pratap Singh, legal advisor for Stallion Publication, told Retraction Watch in an email. “Regrettably, the author was unable to provide satisfactory explanations or empirical validation to resolve our highly detailed peer-review inquiries.”
Head, a social worker and doctoral candidate at Capella University in Minneapolis, said he stands behind the work. The complaints against his paper consist of disputed scholarly interpretations, contested source counts and disagreements about how the literature should be characterized, none of which meet the COPE threshold for retraction, he told us.
“My own read is that this is about the cost of the ongoing legal fees rather than any genuine problem with the article,” he told us. “I think the expense of defending the paper, not its merits, drove the removal.”
Parental alienation (PA) refers to a mental condition in which a child allies with a preferred parent and rejects the other parent without justification. Supporters believe the condition is primarily due to manipulation of the child by the preferred parent and contend PA is a form of emotional child abuse. Critics say the theory lacks scientific evidence and is often weaponized in court to discredit legitimate domestic violence and child abuse claims.
We published a guest post in 2023 by members of PASG that discussed the group’s attempts to get a book with “misinformation” about PA retracted. The post drew many heated comments.
Head’s IJRAH paper, published in January, examined the empirical foundations of PA by synthesizing peer-reviewed research from 1985 to 2025. His analysis found major medical, psychiatric, and psychological professional organizations have “rejected PA as a legitimate concept,” and empirical data shows a “troubling correlation between PA allegations and documented domestic violence, with such claims frequently functioning as litigation strategies that redirect attention from abuse allegations.
PASG sent a letter to IJRAH on Jan. 26, requesting the journal retract the paper. The group outlined several parts of the article it found “unacceptable,” including that Head relied on “non-peer-reviewed and subjective sources rather than scientific data,” he included misinformation about parental alienation and estrangement and his characterization of Gardner was inaccurate.
“This false information gets propagated from one journal to another, from one author to another, and it’s a huge problem because it’s adversely affecting the worlds in which we work,” PASG president Phillip Hendrix told us. “Families get affected by these issues.”
When the journal did not respond, Mini M. Nair, an attorney for PASG based in Kerala, India, sent a legal notice to IJRAH on April 3 threatening to initiate legal proceedings within seven days if the journal did not immediately retract the article, permanently remove it from the journal’s website and publish a formal corrigendum on its homepage acknowledging the paper’s factual errors.
In an April 16 letter, PASG addressed a response from IJRAH that offered several options to address the group’s complaints, including a formal scientific rebuttal, letter to the editor or series of corrigenda, according to the letter. PASG’s attorney wrote that the group appreciated the proposals, but that retraction was the most “appropriate approach.”
“In an academic debate, you’re not allowed to make up statistics or facts that are simply untrue,” William Bernet, PASG founder, told us. “That’s what we’re trying to address: misstatements of fact.”
In an April 20 email, Singh replied the publisher would not be “coerced into summary censorship” by arbitrary deadlines.
Singh wrote that PASG’s “claim of ‘fraudulent data’ was legally and scientifically unsupported” and that under the COPE framework, data fabrication refers to the invention of empirical results, “not an author’s selection of secondary sources” in a critical review. The author “verified every claim made is supported by peer-reviewed citations,” Singh wrote.
She added: “It has come to our attention that your clients have a documented history of attempting to suppress critical scholarship through legal pressure on publishers rather than scholarly response,” referring to a book the group called for Routledge to retract in 2023 and its challenge of a National Institute of Justice-funded empirical study by Joan Meier. Both attempts were unsuccessful.
Following a rejoinder and notice served by PASG’s attorney on May 14, however, the journal changed course. “Pursuant to the demands” raised in PASG’s communication and “in compliance with the relevant statutory standards,” the journal stated it had “immediately taken down and permanently removed” Head’s article, according to a May 19 email to PASG.
Singh told us the removal followed a “comprehensive secondary evaluation by our editorial board and independent psychometric experts,” who identified “critical methodological and structural flaws that undermined the paper’s scientific validity.” According to the journal, this included lack of empirical and scientific backing, methodological conflation, and an unsatisfactory consultation with Head.
Singh denied “external demands or threats of litigation from advocacy groups” dictated the decision.
“We are aware of the systemic sensitivities, external debates, and localized legal friction surrounding the topic of parental alienation,” Singh told us. “However, we must explicitly state that our editorial and legal decisions were guided solely by academic integrity, psychometric quality standards, and our commitment to publishing rigorous research.”
Head believes otherwise. He told us he answered the journal’s questions and sufficiently addressed all of PASG’s allegations with supporting references in emails and calls.
“The message to every early career researcher watching is simple: publish something in a contested field that organized interests want gone, and you can lose the paper and your standing, even when no one shows you were wrong,” he said.
PASG has written rebuttals and letters to the editor about other works and influenced corrections in the past, but Bernet said Head’s IJRAH article is the first “successful” retraction the group has driven. They are also attempting to remove the IJRAH paper from Academia, Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar, he said.
ResearchGate has already removed the paper. A spokesperson for ResearchGate told us it withdrew the paper after receiving a report that the article had been removed from the publisher’s site.
“Upon investigation it was confirmed that this article is no longer available on the publisher’s site and the DOI no longer resolves to a live page. As a result the article’s page on ResearchGate has been removed,” the spokesperson told us. “Neither the article’s content nor its author were part of the decision process. As per [Digital Services Act] regulations, the authors of any removed article are informed of the removal and their right to appeal the decision.”
Head said he’s appealing the decision.
Bernet and Hendrix also sent a letter to editors at Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics with concerns about an opinion article Head authored. Published in April, the article documents an alleged pattern in which proponents of PA have responded to critical scholarship through organized campaigns to retract, withdraw or remove work rather than through scientific debate. Head explores cases where PA supporters have attempted to fuel retraction of critical papers, including the Routledge book. (The paper mentions Retraction Watch’s guest post by PASG about the subject.)
The Frontiers paper also discusses a campaign by PASG and Global Action Research Integrity in Parental Alienation to block a United Nations special rapporteur from presenting a report to the Human Rights Council that recommended states prevent the use of PA in family law proceedings. A response by an international consortium of scholars called the behavior “indicative of harassment campaigns aimed at suppressing and penalizing dissent.”
In their May 24 letter to Frontiers editors, Bernet and Hendrix wrote that “false statements” in the paper about “specific proponents of PA theory may amount to defamation.” They requested the publisher either correct the article with multiple corrigenda and publish only the corrected version where “Head can state his opinions and his conclusions without making any reference at all to the activities of PASG members,” or Frontiers editors should consider retraction.
“We realize that suggestion is somewhat ironic, since the entire message of the article criticizes peremptory and inappropriate retraction of journal articles and book chapters,” the letter reads. “A third possibility is for our colleagues and us to prepare and submit a commentary regarding Head’s objectionable article. We reject this option because Head’s article in its current form would continue to be available for citation by critics of PA theory, which propagates the misinformation.”
Defea Chan, a spokesperson for Frontiers, told us the publisher received a letter from PASG regarding the article and that it is “investigating in accordance with our editorial policies and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidance.”
Head’s paper is “really wrong” to claim PASG is “trying to suppress discourse” Bernet told us. He said the group believes in academic freedom and “adversarial collaboration.”
“We hope that the people who have an interest in parental alienation and the people who criticize it, [can] all get together and produce documents in which we can all agree on,” Bernet told us. “In other words, we hope to have collaboration rather than polarization.”
Head said he believes the removal of his IJRAH paper after legal threats by PASG illustrates the very pattern documented in his latest article.
“My Frontiers paper is about reaching for retraction instead of writing a rebuttal,” Head told us. “Then my IJRAH paper was removed instead of answered. I documented the pattern and then became an example of it.”
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