Category: management

Authors in 2014 peer review ring lose 4 more papers each for “compromised” review

human factors and ergonomicsA journal is pulling additional papers authored by twin brothers for peer review issues.

After retracting three papers by Cheng-Wu Chen earlier this year for “compromised” peer review, Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries is now pulling four more by Chen for the same reason — and four others by his twin brother, Chen-Yuan Chen, who was a the center of a peer review ring that SAGE busted in 2014.

Cheng-Wu Chen lost 21 papers during that episode. He’s now up to 28; Chen-Yuan Chen, who also goes by Peter Chen, is now up to 43. Both are present on our leaderboard.

The notes, which appear in the March/April issue of the journal, are all identical, and also cite issues with citations:

Continue reading Authors in 2014 peer review ring lose 4 more papers each for “compromised” review

Concerns attached to three more papers by retraction-laden management researcher

Fred Walumbwa
Fred Walumbwa

Fred Walumbwa, a management researcher with eight seven retractions, has received three expressions of concern from two journals after he failed to provide raw data following an investigation into potential errors.

In the past, Walumbwa has said he only keeps data until his papers are published, but a lack of raw data has become a common theme in his notices, which now also include four corrections, and one other EOC (making a new total of four). There are no standard rules about how long to store raw data, but one journal that issued two of the new EOCs has since updated its submission policy to require that authors keep data for at least five years.

Walumbwa currently works at Florida International University. When concerns about the statistics were raised about five of his papers in Personnel Psychology, the journal conducted an investigation that led to flagging two of those articles, the expression of concern explains:

Continue reading Concerns attached to three more papers by retraction-laden management researcher

Former accounting prof adds his 33rd retraction

James Hunton
James Hunton

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:

Continue reading Former accounting prof adds his 33rd retraction

Author in 2014 peer review ring loses 3 more papers for peer review problems

cover (1)A journal is retracting three papers — including one that is highly cited — after learning the reviewers that recommended publication had conflicts of interest.

This is a case of family values gone awry: The author common to all papers is Cheng-Wu Chen at the National Kaohsiung Marine University in Taiwan, the twin brother of one Peter Chen, who was a the center of a peer review ring that SAGE busted in 2014 (and holder of the number #3 spot on our leaderboard). Cheng-Wu Chen apparently wasn’t an innocent bystander in that episode: Of the 60 retracted papers by SAGE, Cheng-Wu Chen was a co-author on 21.

The retraction notes for all three papers — published in Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries — are identical:

Continue reading Author in 2014 peer review ring loses 3 more papers for peer review problems

The Big (Retraction) Short: Securitized loans paper may get change of venue

J financeA paper on the securitized loan industry’s pricing practices was pulled from the Journal of Finance, but may be appearing in another journal.

The Journal of Finance issued a notice of withdrawal, for “Who Facilitated Misreporting in Securitized Loans?” by John M. Griffin and Gonzalo Maturana, but does not say why it was taken out.  Griffin’s web site notes that the paper is to be published in the Review of Financial Studies.

Here’s the note, dated Sept. 23: Continue reading The Big (Retraction) Short: Securitized loans paper may get change of venue

Management researcher with 7 retractions issues “clarifications” to 2013 paper

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The authors of a paper on supportive supervisors just want readers to “better understand the reported findings,” and so have issued multiple “clarifications” in a corrigendum note.

Some of the issues addressed in the note have been raised on PubPeer.

The paper’s author list includes one Fred Walumbwa, formerly an Arizona State University management researcher, some of whose work has succumbed to scrutiny in the the past two years. His current list: seven retractions, a megacorrection, an expression of concern, and now this.

“Unraveling the relationship between family-supportive supervisor and employee performance,” published in Group & Organization Management, has been cited twice, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge.

Here’s the note in full:

Continue reading Management researcher with 7 retractions issues “clarifications” to 2013 paper

Correction restores confidence in results of confidence study

Strategic Management JournalA study that looked at how entrepreneurs’ confidence levels change depending on market conditions has been corrected to fix an error that flipped the results of one of the experiments.

The paper was published in 2013 by the Strategic Management Journal, and explored how entrepreneurs stay confident in difficult marketplaces by studying how people reacted to tasks of varying difficulty. In one experiment, participants were asked how well they thought they did on an easy quiz and how well they did on a hard quiz. Results showed that “participants underestimated their scores on the easy quiz” and “overestimated their performance on the difficult quiz.” However, authors wrote the opposite in the final paper.

Here’s the correction notice for “Making Sense of Overconfidence in Market Entry”:

Continue reading Correction restores confidence in results of confidence study

Mega-correction for “empirical anomalies” in management paper

The Academy of Management JournalThe author of a paper that looked at how the geographical spread of research and development sites has impacted innovation has posted a four-page list of corrections that fixed “empirical anomalies” in the paper.

A group of PhD students raised concerns about the paper’s findings, according to the editor-in-chief of The Academy of Management Journal, Gerard George. The journal formed a committee that worked with the author to reproduce the results. That ended with a correction to two of the paper’s three hypotheses, and corresponding parts of the text.

The four-page notice — (the details of which are paywalled, unfortunately) — includes notes from the journal’s editor and the author:

Continue reading Mega-correction for “empirical anomalies” in management paper

German dep’t head reprimanded for not catching mistakes of co-author Lichtenthaler

Holger Ernst
Holger Ernst

The head of a department at WHU — Otto Beisheim School of Management has been charged with “severe scientific misconduct” for not spotting many of the data irregularities of his co-author Ulrich Lichtenthaler, which have ultimately led to 16 retractions.

According to a news release describing a WHU investigation (which we had translated using One Hour Translation), Holger Ernst did not neglect his supervisory duties, but, as a co-author on many of the retracted papers, he should have been more aware of the data issues in Lichtenthaler’s work: Continue reading German dep’t head reprimanded for not catching mistakes of co-author Lichtenthaler

Paper on narcissistic CEOs earns big correction

home_coverIt may not be much of a surprise that narcissistic CEOs of pharmaceutical companies will make bold choices, such as adopting radically new technology. That idea remains true, despite a lengthy correction to a paper that supports it.

The paper, “CEO Narcissism, Audience Engagement, and Organizational Adoption of Technological Discontinuities,” in Administrative Science Quarterly, found support for the following hypothesis:

Continue reading Paper on narcissistic CEOs earns big correction