Two management journals from the same publisher have retracted a pair of articles for taking “models, samples, and results” from each other and earlier work.
A tip from an anonymous account sent in November to Retraction Watch, sleuth Elisabeth Bik, and others called out duplications in the papers. Bik then posted the two articles on PubPeer in November 2024, noting several identical sets of tables between the papers, despite the works investigating survey data on different topics from different populations — intention to leave among employees from the hospitality sector, and resistance to change among managers at private organizations.
“Workplace bullying and intention to leave: a moderated mediation model of emotional exhaustion and supervisory support” was published online July 8, 2020, in Employee Relations and has been cited 35 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The other article, “Resistance to change and turnover intention: a moderated mediation model of burnout and perceived organizational support,” appeared online July 29, 2020, in the Journal of Organizational Change Management (JOCM) and has been cited 59 times.
The journals are both titles of Emerald Publishing and are listed in Clarivate’s Web of Science.
The first author on the articles is Shalini Srivastava, a professor at the Jaipuria Institute of Management in India, according to her faculty profile page. Employee Relations lists her as an associate editor of the journal. Links to Google Scholar and LinkedIn on Srivastava’s faculty profile page appear to have been deleted, although an archived version of the Google Scholar profile exists on the Internet Archive.
The retraction notice for the JOCM article, posted December 23, acknowledged the similarities: “It has come to our attention that a large portion of this article’s models, samples, and results are taken, without full and proper attribution, from an earlier original work” — referring to the other retracted article. The notice continues:
On investigation of this matter, further concerns were raised with regard to the data used as the same analysis employed in the earlier work was also applied here despite the two articles looking at fundamentally different contexts. As such, the findings of this article cannot be relied upon. The authors of this paper would like to note that they agree with the content of this notice.
The notice for the Employee Relations article, published December 24, cites overlap with yet another paper coauthored by Srivastava — a 2019 article on organizational citizenship behavior that appeared in Vision, a journal of the Management Development Institute in Gurgaon, India, published by Sage Publications.
Queries to the editors in chief of JOCM and Employee Relations were answered by a spokesperson from Emerald’s research integrity department. “Emerald’s research integrity team and the Editors-in-Chief of both journals investigated the system evidence and the content of both articles in accordance with COPE’s principles on duplicate publications,” the spokesperson told Retraction Watch. “The authors were contacted for an explanation. The investigation concluded that the responses were insufficient and that the results in the articles could not be relied upon.”
Bik and others have called out several of Srivastava’s articles on PubPeer for various reasons, including for similarities in data and methodology between articles, and for omitting mention of institutional review board approval, participant consent, or recruitment strategy.
Neither Srivastava nor Swati Agrawal, the coauthor on the two retracted articles, responded to requests for comment.
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Not a good look for a journal when one of its associate editors is caught out in publication duplication shenanigans, is it?