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 it with correction.
I discussed it on Twitter. See the thread here:
Journal of Marketing has never retracted an article to my knowledge. But they had a Ping Dong paper, which posed a problem since her papers were getting retracted everywhere thanks to @lakens, @LisaDeBruine and others. Hmmm…what to do. pic.twitter.com/JWejxplMsC
— Aaron Charlton (@AaronCharlton) July 9, 2021
I should note, though, that I was careless in describing how Ping Dong was outed. What I meant to say is that Daniel Lakens and Lisa DeBruine drew attention to her early on, and that this may be related to her getting into trouble, but the details of what happened are not public, and I was wrong to make this connection. I was right to point out that this was probably the earliest mention of problems with a Ping Dong paper.
Aaron Charlton, PhD, MBA is a marketing professional who currently works in industry for Away Clinic and Metascience & Marketing Lab and lives in Mesa, Arizona, USA. He is formerly an academic and still takes interest in improving the quality of research in the field of marketing.
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