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 has six Expressions of Concern at International Review of Social Psychology. I should note that an in-depth investigation of the articles was carried out by the journal which resulted in the recommendation that three of the articles be retracted due to evidence of scientific misconduct. The journal’s editorial team declined to do that and it seems that Guéguen’s employer, Université Bretagne Sud, has also refused to act because he’s still on their website, and everyone I’ve talked to says he still works there.
Blog posts from the investigators:
| Article | Author | Date |
| The Guéguen saga update, summer 2020 edition | Nick Brown | 29 June 2020 |
| An open letter to Dr. Jerker Rönnberg | Nick Brown | 10 July 2019 |
| An update on our examination of the research of Dr. Nicolas Guéguen | Nick Brown | 09 May 2019 |
| A review of the research of Dr. Nicolas Guéguen | Nick Brown | 18 December 2017 |
| Long Hair, Don’t Care | James Heathers | 11 December 2017 |
| More problematic sexual attraction research, this time with high heels | Nick Brown | 04 December 2017 |
| Life in the tinder box | James Heathers | 01 December 2017 |
| Some problems in a field study of sexual attraction and hitchhiking | Nick Brown | 28 November 2017 |
Journalist coverage (English)
| Article | Author | Date |
| RetractionWatch (6 posts) | Marcus, Oransky, Kinkaid | Various |
| Dodgy sex-psychology paper finally gets retracted | Cathleen O’Grady | 16 October 2019 |
| Were These Well-Known Gender Studies Just Made Up? | Robby Berman | 1 December 2017 |
| Researchers find oddities in high-profile gender studies | Cathleen O’Grady | 28 November 2017 |
Journalist coverage (French)
| Article | Author | Date |
| Requiem pour les «études à la con»? | Slate.fr | Peggy Sastre | 6 January 2018 |
| Les méthodes du chercheur Nicolas Guéguen sur la sellette | Par Hervé Morin | 19 December 2017 |
Update
Guéguen has two more Expressions of Concern (in addition to the 6 mentioned above). That makes a total of 3 retractions and 8 Expressions of Concern.
- Expression of Concern: Women’s hairstyle and men’s behavior: A field experiment
- Expression of Concern About Dr. Nicolas Guéguen’s Article Published in the Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science (LEBS)
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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