Criminologist to have four papers retracted following months of scrutiny

A criminology professor at Florida State University whose work has been under the microscope for six months will have four papers retracted, Retraction Watch has learned.

We first reported on the case of Eric Stewart, the FSU professor, in July, after Justin Pickett, one of the co-authors on one of the papers, posted a 27-page explanation of why he thought the article should be retracted. That followed a May 5 letter from a “John Smith” outlining problems with five papers by Stewart. Four of those papers are being retracted.

The paper Pickett co-authored, which was first published in 2011, is now being retracted by Criminology. The notice will read:

This article has been retracted at the request of the authors and by agreement with the journal editors. The second author, in the course of responding to concerns raised with the data and analysis, identified a mistake in the way the original data were merged. This, in conjunction with the discovery of other coding and transcription errors, collectively exceeded what the authors believed to be acceptable for a published paper. They therefore voluntarily requested that the paper be retracted. The third author also requested retraction but disputes that the identified discrepancies are attributable to researcher error.

Another paper co-authored by Stewart, published in 2018, earned a correction in August based on questions raised before “John Smith”’s letter.

Annulla Linders, co-editor of Social Problems, which published two of the papers slated for retraction, told Retraction Watch that she thought the notices had already been posted, but that they were not yet available on the publisher’s site. The journal had already subjected the papers to expressions of concern, one of which we reported on in early September.

Editors of Law & Society Review said that the timing of the notice’s publication for the paper in their journal was up to Wiley, which publishes it.

In July, we noted that Criminology,

…where one of the paper’s co-authors, Brian Johnson, is an editor — told Pickett that it only retracts when there are legal issues with a paper. According to our database, the journal has never retracted a paper. Johnson confirmed for Retraction Watch that the authors are working on a correction.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story about the case on September 24, and four days later, the co-editors of Criminology issued a statement walking through their process for reviewing concerns about the paper, and saying that “the preferred approach is to employ the classical comment-and-reply model.” Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, which publishes the journal, the editors announced the retraction of the 2011 paper.

Neither the editors of Criminology nor Stewart have responded to our new requests for comment. It is unclear whether the 2018 Criminology paper “John Smith” flagged is being retracted.

Update, 1300 UTC, 11/24/19: On November 19, about 12 hours after this post was published, the editors of Criminology posted a statement confirming that the 2011 paper would be retracted with the notice above. They also wrote that they have “not yet reached a conclusion” about the 2018 paper.

Update, 2230 UTC, 11/25/19: The retraction notices have now appeared in Social Problems. They read (with different titles):

The authors of “The Social Context of Latino Threat and Punitive Latino Sentiment” have retracted this article because of errors uncovered in the paper subsequent to its publication that exceed what the authors view as acceptable for a published paper. 

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