Former accounting professor James Hunton has added a 33rd retraction to his total, solidifying his position at #10 on our leaderboard.
Hunton’s official total is 33.5, since one journal retracted only one section of a paper, making it a “partial” retraction. Most of those retractions came last year, the fallout from an investigation at Bentley University which concluded that the accounting researcher had committed misconduct. Hunton resigned from the university in 2012 after his first retraction, citing family matters.
After the Bentley University investigation, the journal Contemporary Accounting Research conducted its own review of the paper, and found “no credible evidence exists to support the validity of the data in the study,” according to the retraction note for “Decision Aid Reliance: A Longitudinal Field Study Involving Professional Buy-Side Financial Analysts.”
Here’s the entire retraction note:
The above article has been retracted by agreement among the following parties: authors Vicky Arnold and Jacqueline Reck: Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR) Editor-in Chief Patricia C. O’Brien; the Canadian Academic Accounting Association, which holds the copyright; and publisher Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Bentley University conducted an investigation into the research activities of Dr. J. E. Hunton, and concluded that Dr. Hunton had engaged in research misconduct. The report (available at https://www.bentley.edu/files/Hunton%20report%20July21.pdf) called into question all of Dr. Hunton’s work involving data. A team of CAR editors reviewed that report, responses from co-authors, and evidence from a supplemental investigation by Bentley University that relates to the above paper. The editors concluded that no credible evidence exists to support the validity of the data in the study, despite a positive search for such evidence. They found no evidence of complicity or misconduct by Dr. Hunton’s co-authors. Based on that review, they determined that the article should be retracted, to maintain the journal’s standards of academic integrity and to correct the academic literature. Dr. Hunton declined to comment on this retraction.
The paper has been cited four times, once by the retraction notice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.
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