“Unfinished business”: Diederik Stapel retraction count rises to 53

Two more papers by Diederik Stapel — who was profiled by The New York Times Magazine this weekend — have been retracted, both in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The notice for “Hardly thinking about close and distant others: On cognitive business and target closeness in social comparison effects,” by Stapel and David Marx, and cited six times:

Pfizer database errors cause two voluminous retractions for JACC statin-biomarker papers

Coding errors in a database maintained by Pfizer have led authors to retract two heart biomarker papers in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The two notices, for “Prediction of cardiovascular events in statin-treated patients by lipid and non-lipid biomarkers” and “Plasma PCSK9 levels and clinical outcomes in the TNT (Treating to New Targets) Trial,” are highly detailed and say the same thing:

Heart attack: Two cardiology retractions, plus a notice of duplication, in three different journals

We’ve come across three notices in cardiology journals this week, so although they’re unrelated, we’re gathering them here.

Item 1, from Circulation Research:

Diederik Stapel retraction count hits 50

It’s Diederik Stapel’s golden retraction: Number 50.

The lucky notice appears in Social Psychology:

Cardiologist accused of misconduct strikes back in a journal

Retraction Watch readers may recall the case of Don Poldermans, a prominent Dutch cardiology researcher who left a research position in late 2011 amid an investigation into his work. In a letter in the American Journal of Medicine titled “Scientific Fraud or a Rush to Judgement?” Poldermans — three of whose papers are subject to Expressions of Concern — tries to set the record straight, something he has tried to do before.

Poldermans is responding to an editorial by Vineet Chopra and Kim Eagle, “Perioperative Mischief: The Price of Academic Misconduct,” which Chopra and Eagle based on a November 2011 press release:

“When we wonder what it all means”: Stapel retraction count rises to 49

Diederik Stapel is up to 49 retractions.

Here are the latest three, from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin:

Retraction 46 arrives for Diederik Stapel

Diederik Stapel has a new retraction, his 46th.

Here’s the notice for “The effects of diffuse and distinct affect. ” by Diederik A. Stapel, Willem Koomen and Kirsten I. Ruys, which appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2002:

Stapel watch reaches 45 retractions

Keeping up with the retraction count of Diederik Stapel is proving to be a, well, staple of this job. Four more retractions brings the figure to 45.

The articles in question are:

This is 40 (and 41): More retractions for Diederik Stapel

It turns out we missed two more recent retractions from Diederik Stapel. They were nestled in the table of contents of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that contained four retractions we covered last week.

The notices, for “Method matters: Effects of explicit versus implicit social comparisons on activation, behavior, and self views” (cited 48 times, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge) and “From seeing to being: Subliminal social comparisons affect implicit and explicit self-evaluations” (cited 95 times), both say the same thing:

The 39 retractions: Stapel’s count rises again

It’s getting hard to keep up. A day ago, we noted that Diederik Stapel’s retraction count had risen to 38. But later in the day, we heard about number 39, from the European Journal of Social Psychology.

Here’s the notice for “Making sense of war: Using the interpretation comparison model to understand the Iraq conflict”: