Regular Retraction Watch readers may have noticed that many of the people whose fraud we write about are men. Certainly, the top retraction earners — Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Naoki Mori, to name a few — all have a Y chromosome. But that doesn’t necessarily mean our sample size is representative. Now … Continue reading Are men more likely to commit scientific fraud?
A new paper has catalogued retractions over the past few decades in business and economics journals — and hasn’t found very many. In “Retraction, Dishonesty and Plagiarism: Analysis of a Crucial Issue for Academic Publishing, and the Inadequate Responses from Leading Journals in Economics and Management Disciplines,” which just went online in the Journal of … Continue reading Why aren’t there more retractions in business and economics journals?
Today’s Retraction Watch, to paraphrase Sesame Street, is brought to you by the number 13. Earlier, we reported on several retractions from Diederik Stapel that bring his total to that number, and now we’ve learned about number 13 for Dipak Das. Das is of course the UConn researcher who was found to have committed 145 … Continue reading Seeing red (wine): Another retraction for Dipak Das, making count 13
A second psychology researcher has resigned after statistical scrutiny of his papers by another psychologist revealed data that was too good to be true. Ed Yong, writing in Nature, reports that Lawrence Sanna, most recently of the University of Michigan, left his post at the end of May. That was several months after Uri Simonsohn, … Continue reading University of Michigan psychologist resigns following concerns by statistical sleuth Simonsohn: Nature
The social psychology community, already rocked last year by the Diederik Stapel scandal, now has another set of allegations to dissect. Dirk Smeesters, a professor of consumer behavior and society at the Rotterdam School of Management, part of Erasmus University, has resigned amid serious questions about his work. According to an Erasmus press release, a … Continue reading Following investigation, Erasmus social psychology professor retracts two studies, resigns
Don Poldermans, a leading heart specialist, has been fired over concerns that he committed research misconduct. According to a report on the website DutchNews.nl: Erasmus University in Rotterdam has sacked a professor in cardio-vascular medicine for damaging the institution’s academic integrity and for ‘scientific misconduct’, the NRC reports on Thursday. The professor is accused of faking … Continue reading Breaking news: Prolific Dutch heart researcher fired over misconduct concerns
We’re pleased to present an excerpt from chapter 10, “The Replication Crisis,” of Augustine Brannigan’s The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method in Social Psychology (Routledge 2021), with permission from the publisher. Contemporary social psychology has been seized over the past years by a loss of credibility and self-confidence associated with scientific fraud and … Continue reading Social psychology in the age of retraction
While the presence of publication bias – the selective publishing of positive studies – in science is well known, debate continues about how extensive such bias truly is and the best way to identify it. The most recent entrant in the debate is a paper by Robbie van Aert and co-authors, who have published a … Continue reading Just how common is positive publication bias? Here’s one researcher who’s trying to figure that out
This week at Retraction Watch featured the return of a notorious fraudster, and plagiarism of plagiarism. Here’s what was happening elsewhere:
We’ve learned a lot about retractions in 2012, from the fact that most retractions are due to misconduct to the effects they can have on funding. We’ve seen eyebrow-raising reasons for retractions, from a hack of Elsevier’s peer review system to a researcher peer reviewing his own papers, to massive fraud in psychology to a … Continue reading How many retractions were there in 2012? And, some shattered records