Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T09:20:30.443Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Last Line of Defense: Corrigenda and Retractions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2018

P. D. Harms*
Affiliation:
University of Alabama
Marcus Credé
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
Justin A. DeSimone
Affiliation:
University of Alabama
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to P. D. Harms, University of Alabama, 101 Alston Hall, Box 870225, 361 Stadium Drive, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487. E-mail: pdharms@cba.ua.edu

Extract

One of the key characteristics of a rigorous and robust science is that it has the ability to self-correct when mistakes are made. The focal article by Grand et al. (2018) has plenty to say about what faithful actors can do to ensure a more robust industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology literature, but we were surprised at how little attention the issue of correcting the research record was given. To be clear, the target article mentions the issue of research misconduct and even cites an article from Leadership Quarterly (Atwater, Mumford, Schriesheim, & Yammarino, 2014) that deals specifically with the issue, but it does not include guidance on this issue for editors or publishers. This is not surprising. The issue of misconduct is one that produces a great deal of discomfort in academic circles (Wager, 2015), and when it is discussed, it is usually only in the vaguest terms (e.g., Banks et al., 2016). Moreover, as Grand and colleagues point out, it could be argued that the “gathering storm” of questionable research that has enveloped other fields such as social psychology seems distant. Perhaps to reassure us, the authors point to several articles showing that results of our field seem to be replicable, robust, and relevant. But are they?

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.Google Scholar
Atwater, L. E., Mumford, M. D., Schriesheim, C. A., & Yammarino, F. J. (2014). Retraction of leadership articles: Causes and prevention. Leadership Quarterly, 25, 11741180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banks, G. C., O'Boyle, E. H. Jr., Pollack, J. M., White, C. D., Batchelor, J. H., Whelpley, C. E., . . . Adkins, C. L. (2016). Questions about questionable research practices in the field of management: A guest commentary. Journal of Management, 42, 520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cortina, J. M., Green, J. P., Keeler, K. R., & Vandenberg, R. J. (2017). Degrees of freedom in SEM: Are we testing the models that we claim to test? Organizational Research Methods, 20 (3), 350378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Credé, M. & Harms, P. D. (2015). 25 years of higher-order confirmatory factor analysis in the organizational sciences: A critical review and development of reporting recommendations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36, 845872.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grand, J. A., Rogelberg, S. G., Allen, T. D., Landis, R. S., Reynolds, D. H., Scott, J. C., . . . Truxillo, D. M. (2018). A systems-based approach to fostering robust science in industrial-organizational psychology. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 11 (1), 4–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harley, B., Faems, D., & Corbett, A. (2014). A few bad apples or the tip of an iceberg? Academic misconduct in publishing. Journal of Management Science, 51, 13611363.Google Scholar
Lu, S. F., Jin, G., Uzzi, B., & Jones, B. (2013). The retraction penalty: Evidence from the Web of Science. Nature Scientific Reports, 3, 3146. DOI: 10.1038/srep03146.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mitchell, G. (2012). Revisiting truth or triviality: The external validity of research in the psychological laboratory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 109117.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nuijten, M. B., Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Assen, M. A. L. M., Epskamp, S., & Wicherts, J. M. (2016). The prevalence of statistical reporting errors in psychology (1985–2013). Behavior Research Methods, 48, 12051226.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rynes, S., Colbert, A., & Brown, K. (2002). HR professionals’ beliefs about effective human resource practices: Correspondence between research and practice. Human Resource Management, 41, 149174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vanhove, A., & Harms, P. D. (2015). Reconciling the two disciplines of organizational science: A comparison of findings from lab and field research. Applied Psychology: An International Review, 64, 637673.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wager, E. (2015). Why are retractions so difficult? Science Editing, 2, 3234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar