I’m so incredible disappointed in the journal Criminology. It is meant to be the flagship journal in our field, but it is clearly not up to the task these days.
The journal is published by Wiley, so lets start reviewing the publishing house’s general policy on retractions here: https://authorservices.wiley.com/ethics-guidelines/retractions-and-expressions-of-concern.html. Just take a look at the first point:
“Wiley is committed to playing its part in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record, therefore on occasion, it is necessary to retract articles. Articles may be retracted if:
– There is major scientific error which would invalidate the conclusions of the article, for example where there is clear evidence that findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error).”
What I know about the story has been in the public for a while. In July, Justin Pickett posed this paper on SocArXiv here: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/9b2k3/ , explaining that an earlier paper has fundamental errors. Surprisingly, a survey of 500, but the article reports n = 1,184. While I can understand errors can lead to duplicates, I do not understand that it can happen without noticing. Pickett details numerous other errors, and asks for the article to be retracted. That seems like a perfectly reasonable request, and I fail to see how it could be declined. But it has.
A story in The Chronicle Review (behind paywall, but is also available here) reveals astonishing statements from the chief editor, David McDowall, who even says he has not read Picketts letter thoroughly. Any editor receiving such a letter should be highly alarmed and should indeed consider all details very carefully. Apparently, the editorial team does little or nothing. Or at least: fail to communicate that they are doing anything.
I find the following quote particularly disturbing:
First, McDowall seems to think a correction of errors has the goal of ruining other people’s career. I have to say that Pickett’s letter seems to me to be sober and to the point. Pickett gave his co-author more than fair chance to make the corrections himself before publishing his note. It seems like a last resort, not a blood sport at all. If the authors had just admitted the errors and agreed to retract, it would have been a regrettable mistake, but now it is a scandal.
Second, a flagship journal should never publish “complete gibberish”! That some (or even many) articles turned out to be wrong, fail to replicate and contains errors is not that surprising (although not desirable, of course), but “complete gibberish” should not occur. If it nevertheless happens, those articles should be retracted.
The unwillingness of the journal’s chief editor to take this matter seriously reveals a serious lack of concern with the truth. That should be unacceptable to Wiley as well as the American Society of Criminology.
I am just so very, very disappointed.
P.S. I do not have any solutions to the systemic problems here, but improvements should be easy. Criminology as a field has to improve in terms of making data available with full documentation and reproducible code. That would make errors detectable sooner.