It turns out we missed two more recent retractions from Diederik Stapel. They were nestled in the table of contents of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that contained four retractions we covered last week.
The notices, for “Method matters: Effects of explicit versus implicit social comparisons on activation, behavior, and self views” (cited 48 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge) and “From seeing to being: Subliminal social comparisons affect implicit and explicit self-evaluations” (cited 95 times), both say the same thing:
This retraction follows the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel. The Noort Committee has determined data supplied by Diederik A. Stapel to be fraudulent. His co-author was unaware of his actions and was not involved in the collection of the fraudulent data.
These are retractions 40 and 41 for Stapel.
Hat tip: Fabian Strosche
How many of his papers have NOT been retracted?
at what point do you stop counting?
More importantly, at what point does one stop caring? I think the first retraction has the most profound impact on the individual but then it asymptotically approaches zero as the number of retractions grows. My hypothesis is that for round numbers like 10th retraction, 100th retraction, 666th retraction the impact spikes but not by much. Stapel could actually share some first-hand experiences with this but I do not think he would be able to find a partner willing to process the data he provides.