Category: Retractions & errors

  • 2022 marketing metascience year in review

    2022 marketing metascience year in review

    First, definitely check out the 2021 marketing metascience year in review if you haven’t yet. This is an update of that review. Let’s get into it! Just like 2021, 2022 has brought a deluge of new replications and bias studies, which is great because there had been very little effort to test the trustworthiness of […]

  • Three strikes for marketing professor, Nicolas Guéguen (but he doesn’t appear to be out)

    Three strikes for marketing professor, Nicolas Guéguen (but he doesn’t appear to be out)

    Nicolas Guéguen, a marketing professor at Université Bretagne Sud, now holds the title for most retractions of any currently working marketing professor with three. In honor of this occasion, I’ve created this catalog of all the articles about marketing’s most notorious professor who is still employed in the field. In addition to three retractions, Guéguen […]

  • Dan Ariely claims authorship order shields him from blame; speculates that a low-level envelope stuffer committed the fraud

    Dan Ariely claims authorship order shields him from blame; speculates that a low-level envelope stuffer committed the fraud

    If you haven’t heard, world-famous marketing professor, Dan Ariely, was caught with fake data in fall of 2021. I’m not saying that he faked the data but he hasn’t done anything yet (show evidence, explain what happened, etc.) that would make anybody think it was someone else. Well in June of 2022, he finally did […]

  • A follow up post about the recent JMR retraction

    A follow up post about the recent JMR retraction

    I found it interesting that the investigative team did a last digit analysis because I did not include any last digit analysis in my complaint. The idea of the last digit analysis is that a set of last digits from a group of related numbers should in most cases be randomly uniformly distributed from 0 […]

  • Another Jayati Sinha paper with impossible means

    Another Jayati Sinha paper with impossible means

    My opinion: The effects don’t pass the smell test Sinha and Wang (2013) claim there is a type of loneliness x time horizon crossover interaction effect on impulsive behavior. Any time you see a bunch of massive crossover effects it’s interesting. This is really the holy grail of marketing. The best way to get this kind […]

  • AMA actively discourages authors from sharing their data with 3rd parties

    AMA actively discourages authors from sharing their data with 3rd parties

    If you don’t know,  American Marketing Association (AMA) is the biggest association in marketing. They have four major journals, including two of our top four (Journal of Marketing and Journal of Marketing Research). A unique thing about AMA is that they have never retracted a paper at any of their journals. This is surprising given […]

  • The mystery of the “Red Potato Chip Study” Part 1

    The mystery of the “Red Potato Chip Study” Part 1

    Picture is the author attempting to replicate the red chip protocol with his children acting as lab assistants. Prior to Brian Wansink being relieved of his duties due to scientific misconduct and his subsequent resignation, he ran the “Red Potato Chip Study” (Geier, Wansink & Rozin, 2012). The study claimed that people would eat fewer […]

  • 2021 marketing meta-science year in review

    2021 marketing meta-science year in review

    Okay so we are starting to learn that there could be some issues with the way that we are doing research currently. That’s okay. It’s part of the process. We can take a hard look, make changes, and come out better for it. Specifically, it looks like there may be a lot of noise mining […]

  • About that metaphor priming paper…

    About that metaphor priming paper…

    I recently reported this paper for impossible means [link]. A few notes about the process and paper: I was very pleased with how Patricia Bauer, the editor of Psych Science handled everything. She was super appreciative and kind. And Greg Francis did an excellent job on the analysis and writeup I thought. I have zero […]

  • Conflicts between Dan Ariely’s statement and Footnote #14 (DataColada #98)

    Conflicts between Dan Ariely’s statement and Footnote #14 (DataColada #98)

    So cool that another fraudulent paper was discovered and outed. I noticed that there were conflicts between the author’s statement (he seems to blame his industry partner?) and other facts of the case. I just wanted to highlight the conflicts here because these are things that we need explained better if we are going to […]

  • Rampant speculation is the outcome of institutional silence around retractions and firings

    Rampant speculation is the outcome of institutional silence around retractions and firings

    I noticed that after two marketing researchers (Nicole Coleman and Ping Dong) lost their jobs and got a series of retractions, there has been a wave of speculation. Not gossip about the two researchers as I would expect, but distrust of institutions; feelings of “who is the next junior researcher to be thrown under the […]

  • The salvaging of a Ping Dong paper at Journal of Marketing

    Ping Dong resigned from Northwestern and disappeared, ghosting her coauthors. She had numerous articles retracted, including 3 from top marketing journals [link].  Somehow, her coauthors of one JM article convinced JM to drop her as 1st author, let them rerun all the studies (except for the first one which was a field study) and republish […]