Introduction

Ethical principles and the development of integrity are not new to the field of management academic research (Robertson et al. 2013). According to the editorial comments of Kacmar (2009) published in Academy of Management Journal and those of Schminke (2009) published in Academy of Management Review, ethical research misconduct is of growing concern to academic management researchers. Academic research integrity and ethics point to a faithful adherence to high moral values and professional requirements as outlined by professional organizations, research institutions and, when relevant, governments and the public (Steneck 2006). According to Anderson et al. (2013), both are motives for continued investment in management research and for a reliance on related scientific findings for respective management decision-making purposes. Nevertheless, there have been confirmed cases of research misconduct in the field of management academic research (Schminke and Ambrose 2011).

Management academic research is founded on policies and is therefore required to comply with accepted practices of relevant institutional and sponsoring policies (state, federal and private funding agencies). Thus, research misconduct policies that may apply to management research cover significant deviations or failures to adhere strictly to associated acceptable research practices defined by the pertinent research community. Deliberate fabrication, falsification and plagiarism in suggesting, carrying out, or stating research outputs comprise major forms of management research misconduct in management science. Fabrication involves the deliberate forging of data or results and recording or reporting on these data (Office of the Science and Technology Policy 2000; Bird and Dustira 2000). Falsification involves intentionally manoeuvring research materials, data or results such that a study is not precisely described in study records (Office of the Science and Technology Policy 2000; Bird and Dustira 2000). Plagiarism involves knowingly arrogating another individual’s thoughts, processes, results or words without affording them apposite recognition (Office of the Science and Technology Policy 2000; Bird and Dustira 2000).

As further buttressed by Anderson et al. (2013), uncovering research misconduct entails the meaningful inclusion and/or exclusion of data with the intention to misinform the reader of the outcomes of a study. However, unethical management academic research does not include genuine mistakes or variances made in terms of interpretations, judgements of research outputs, and submitted research reports (Anderson et al. 2013). A retraction of affected article(s) in most cases is a consequence of the performance of confirmed and duly investigated questionable research practices or misconduct according to Fang et al. (2012). Thus, in this study, the retraction of articles resulting from research misconduct is defined as a means of fostering responsible conduct in academic research on management.

Retraction initiatives initiated by journal publishers are poised to promote good research ethics among authors, to enhance levels of integrity in the publishing business, to prevent future authors from facing consequences of retraction and to minimize risks associated with basing decisions on unretracted articles that violate research ethics. However, ethical issues culminating in the retraction of articles remain as unresolved issues in the management sciences (Honig and Bedi 2012; Robertson et al. 2013). Moreover, unlike in the basic medical sciences, little attention has been paid to issues of research misconduct in the management academic research and in publications employing structured analysis methods (Pinho et al. 2012). Hence, this paper focuses on management academic research ethics and issues of integrity based on a structured analysis of retracted articles. The study includes five more sections that respectively list our research methods, our results, a discussion, implications of the study and conclusions.

Methods

We applied a structured literature review methodology that has been used in studies such as Massaro et al. (2015), Dumay et al. (2015), Borrego et al. (2014), and Hess and Fore (2017). Our use of the structure literature review approach is based on its importance for appraising and critically orchestrating relevant studies to project future practices within the research area (Borrego et al. 2014). In accordance with Borrego et al. (2014), steps involve deciding to do a review, identifying the scope and research question, defining inclusion criteria, finding and cataloguing sources, critiquing, appraising and synthesizing. Borrego et al.’s structured literature review steps were later adapted by Hess and Fore (2017) in their recent work. Moreover, Massaro et al. (2015) employed steps such as defining research questions, writing a research protocol for a review, defining inclusion criteria for articles prior to searching, carrying out a comprehensive literature search, developing a coding framework, and performing article coding/reliability analyses and extensive analyses of the reviewed literature and a detailed discussion of the results. These systematic steps of structured literature reviews as highlighted by Massaro et al. (2015), Borrego et al. (2014) and Hess and Fore (2017) were used in this study, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Systematic steps involved in the structured literature review [adapted from Hess and Fore (2017)]
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Defining the Research Questions

As stated in the Introduction, little attention has been paid to issues of research misconduct in management academic research and publications (Pinho et al. 2012). Hence, we aim to identify issues of management academic research ethics and integrity by employing a structured literature review approach. To achieve this aim, the following predetermined research questions are posed.

RQ1

How are issues of academic ethics and integrity culminating in retractions of articles on management research?

RQ2

How might issues of academic ethics and integrity culminate in retractions of articles on management research in the future?

Literature Search

An Internet search via Crossref and Google Scholar was performed using Boolean strings (e.g., retracted journals of management science; notices of management science journal retraction; misconduct in management; research integrity in management science; fabrication and falsification of results in management science). It is important to note that articles used in this study are limited to only Scopus indexed journals and articles published in English. For the first search, the terms “article retraction” and “research integrity issues” were used, resulting in the identification of 8599 journal articles in all fields including management science. For instance, a study by Zhao et al. (2010) was excluded from our analysis because the authors focused on the field of software engineering. The search was restricted to retracted articles in management science based on keyword queries, yielding a total of 272 retracted articles. The first and second authors performed further investigations to ensure that the articles used are those indexed in the Scopus database. To ensure that the articles are relevant to the study, the first and second authors did a quick scan of notices of retraction, titles, and abstracts, leaving 50 retracted articles covering the period of 2005 to 2016. The final 50 retracted articles obtained formed the dataset used in the study.

Grouping of Retracted Journal Articles

In total, 50 retracted journal articles covering different aspects of management science were found to contain retraction or retraction notices for 2005 to 2016. These journals were subsequently grouped to reflect the focuses and themes of the retracted articles and the locations of the universities where the studies were carried out, as shown in Table 2.

Table 2 Categorization of retracted journal articles
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Category 1: Focuses of the Retracted Articles

For this part of the study, each of the 50 retracted journal articles was analysed based on different sub-fields of management science. Hence, the different sub-fields identified denote the focus of the retracted articles examined in this study. Seven focuses (accounting, business ethics, supply chain management, knowledge management, project management, human resources management and quality management) were identified from the analysis of retracted journal articles.

Category 2: Themes of the Retracted Articles

Here the articles were categorized based on reasons given for retractions as stated in notices of retraction. The articles were further categorized into different retraction sub-themes (e.g., data falsification, duplication of submitted articles, plagiarism, data irregularities and incomplete citations and technical errors found in the articles).

Category 3: The Locations Where Studies were Carried Out

For this category, retracted articles were grouped according to the location of the university where a study was conducted. From the analysis, the following countries were identified: Germany, China, Iran, Libya, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States of America (USA).

Coding of Retracted Articles and Reliability Analysis

To prevent personal biases and to improve the quality of coding, a team of coders that included the three authors of the present study was used. The use of multiple coders is an attribute of content analysis, a technique that is typically employed to make replicable and valid interpretations by analysing, interpreting and coding written materials such as journal articles (Elo et al. 2014). In the present study, the first and second authors separately coded the 50 articles in line with the coding framework. When no consensus was arrived at between the coding methods of the first and second author, the third author resolved any discrepancy as outlined by Larsson (1993). An inter-coder reliability test using Cohen’s Kappa was performed on the coded articles to minimize risks of coding bias (Juremi et al. 2017). The inter-coder reliability test was used to measure the extent of agreement between the first and second authors. The reliability analysis was done using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23 software. Cohen’s Kappa coefficients obtained from the reliability analysis are presented in Table 1. According to Cohen (1960), perfect agreement is attained between two raters when the Kappa coefficient is between 0.81 and 1.00. Interestingly, Kappa coefficients of greater than 0.81 (0.838, 0.898 and 0.969) were obtained for focuses, themes, and locations, respectively. This implies that perfect agreement was reached between the first and second authors during coding. Hence, the authors conclude that the results presented are reliable.

Results

A detail account of the results (see Table 1) of our analysis of the retracted articles is presented in the following subsections to answer RQ1 “How are issues of academic ethics and integrity culminating in retractions of articles on management research?”

Focus of the Retracted Articles

The articles studied focus on accounting, business ethics, supply chain management, knowledge management, project management, human resources management and quality management (Table 1). Of the articles analysed, four represented 8% focus on accounting (Wier et al. 2005; Deng and Qing 2007; Tan et al. 2010; Lai et al. 2010), two represented 4% focus on business ethics (Tseng et al. 2010; Schminke and Ambrose 2011), three represented 6% focus on supply chain management (Salam 2009; Wang et al. 2010; Karami et al. 2015), 36 represented 72% focus on knowledge management and five represented 10% focus on project management, human resources management and quality management. The focuses of the retracted articles show that research misconduct issues apply to several areas of management science but are more concentrated in the knowledge management sub-field.

Themes of the Retracted Articles

An analysis of themes of the retracted articles shows that the trend cuts across different forms of ethical misconduct (e.g., data falsification, duplication of submitted articles, plagiarism, data irregularities and incomplete citation and technical errors) (Table 1). Our analysis of the different articles shows that cases of data falsification and duplicate article submission (three and four articles, respectively) represent 14% of the articles analysed (Wier et al. 2005; Salam 2009; Tan et al. 2010; Vahedi and Irani 2011; Karami et al. 2015). Interestingly, plagiarism, which was found in 40 of the articles (representing 80% all of the articles), is the most frequently reported form of ethical misconduct (Song and Wang 2009; Yao and Zhu 2009; Lai et al. 2010; Tseng et al. 2010; Tohidi and Jabbari 2012; Nicolae 2014). The remaining 6% are articles with technical errors and those with data irregularities and incomplete citations. As plagiarism is the most prevalent unethical practice found among the retracted articles, the distribution of retracted papers with plagiarism issues is shown in Fig. 1. Figure 1 shows that the increase observed from 2005 to 2008 was negligible. However, there was a sudden rise from 2009 and a peak in 2010. Subsequently, there was a sharp fall in the number of retracted articles from 2011, and thereafter, levels stabilized.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Distributions of retracted articles in KM

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The Locations in Which Studies were Carried Out

It is noteworthy that research misconduct is a global issue that occurs in numerous countries. From our analysis of the retracted articles, two retracted studies were conducted in Germany (representing 4% of the articles), three retracted studies (representing 6% of the articles) were conducted in Malaysia and Thailand, and seven retracted studies (representing 14% of the articles) were conducted in Iran, Libya and Taiwan. Surprisingly, thirty-four retracted studies (representing 68% of the articles analysed) were undertaken in China while four of the retracted articles (representing 8%) were carried out in the USA.

Journal Analysis

All of the papers listed in the database are indexed in Scopus, a reputable indexing organization. However, most of the retracted articles were published in different journals of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization known for the publication of high-quality papers. Thirty-six retracted articles, representing 72% of the articles retracted, were published in journals and proceedings of the IEEE. The remaining 38% of the retracted articles were published in Accounting Horizons, Journal of Business Ethics, Procedia Computer Science, Journal of Industrial and Corporate Change, Contemporary Accounting Research, Management and Organization Review, Strategic Management Journal, Proceedia Social and Behavioural Science and Global Business and Organization Excellence.

Discussion

This section presents a deeper analysis into specific issues found from the articles based on an examination of the descriptive results presented above as well as providing solutions to the research questions of the study.

It is noteworthy that most authors of the retracted journals analysed for the study period focused on knowledge management as a sub-field within the management sciences. Knowledge management as an emerging field in management science is quickly gaining widespread acceptance and popularity (Akhavan et al. 2016). The acceptability and popularity of knowledge management are a product of publication levels, which grew astronomically between 1996 and 2012, as reported by Akhavan et al. (2016). Therefore, every researcher of this emerging field strives to make remarkable contributions through the publication of their research outputs. This places enough pressure on researchers to “cut corners” and engage in ethical misconduct as reported by Fanelli et al. (2015). In addition to those of knowledge management, retracted articles are less concentrated in other fields of management science such as accounting, business ethics, supply chain management, project management, human resources management and quality management.

From our analysis of the locations in which the retracted studies were conducted, it is interesting to note that China shows the highest number of retracted articles relative to other countries. This can be attributed to the fact that universities in China use incentive pay systems as a means of rewarding publications in high-impact journals (Chen and Macfarlane 2016). In view of this, academics tend to compromise the quality of papers for quantity to secure more rewards. Although, Russikoff et al. (2003) have reiterated that research misconduct is a cross-cultural phenomenon, research misconduct is more common in some countries than in others. In agreement with Russikoff et al. (2003), Farthing (2014) also stated that research misconduct and especially plagiarism is a global challenge of the 21th century. Chen and Macfarlane (2016) also highlighted that the number of journal articles from China involving misconduct increased astronomically between 1999 and 2013. As stated above, this could be a result of an incentive system put in place to reward publications in high impact journals. This does not imply that there are no measures put in place by the Chinese Ministry of Education to discipline those engaging in research misconduct. In fact, in 2009, China’s Ministry of Education released six separate policies on academic misconduct to discipline those who had defaulted.

A further analysis of themes of the retracted articles shows that various forms of research misconducts such as data falsification, the duplication of submitted articles, plagiarism, data irregularities and incomplete citation characterize management academic research. Of these forms of unethical research misconduct, plagiarism was found to be predominant. This is consistent with the work of Bedeian et al. (2010) who reported that plagiarism is one of the most common forms of ethical violation engaged in within the management discipline. Similarly, Pupovac and Fanelli (2015) affirmed that plagiarism is more frequently used than other forms of academic misconduct. Furthermore, Batane (2010) stated that issues of research misconduct among researchers in the management sciences is on the rise and that these individuals can be likened to “monsters” who destroy principles of academic integrity.

Implications of the Study

The aim of this section is to answer RQ2: “How might issues of academic ethics and integrity culminate in retractions of articles on management research in the future?” In answering this question, the authors draw from the results and findings of this study to address its several implications.

Management research misconduct involves a breach of relevant fundamental management scientific and research policies. Academic researchers are often faced with different pressures because an author’s success with publication can dictate career advancement and the capacity to attract funding. In the present study, we studied retracted articles published in the field of management sciences from 2005 to 2016. As one implication of this study, we show that institutional factors motivate research misconduct and especially plagiarism (which was the most common reason for retraction during the studied period), and this should be explored further. Additionally, based on our findings, the unethical practices identified are not restricted to any particular geographical location even though we show that they are more frequent used in certain countries. Thus, it can be inferred that under-investigated regional factors such as cultural and/or country-related contexts may account for these unethical research behaviours. In addition, it appears that issues of ethical misconduct are still prevalent in management academic research even with the existence of article retraction initiatives. Of the different aspect of management research covered in this study, KM academic research is worth researching as it includes the largest number of retracted articles for the period investigated. Therefore, this study encourages further research on how management academic research ethics can be promoted in this direction. Other unidentified underlying factors encouraging different forms of research misconduct in the management field should be thoroughly investigated and future solutions should be proposed.

According to Steneck (2006), research is mainly an activity undertaken by experts, as it is carried out and in part guided by individuals who have been specially trained to conduct research. One of the primary functions of a university is to inspire a quest for research. This obligation can be achieved through the continuous sensitization of individual members of the academic community to ethical behaviour. Meanwhile, various authors have agreed that the occurrence of article retraction constitutes a sign of research misconduct. Article retraction initiatives reinforce confidence that the public and funding bodies have in the integrity of management academic research and of the scientific process. Hence, this should be upheld in the future.

Additionally, the extent of plagiarism conducted in management academic research should be determined through the use of more advanced plagiarism software to ensure and enforce ethical management research and publishing in the future. Reports have indicated that the most reputable publishing organizations typically review the coinciding degree of a submitted manuscript using diverse similarity detector software (Schminke and Ambrose 2011). For instance, Elsevier and Springer use the EES (Elsevier Editorial System) and an Editorial Manager for the processing of submitted manuscripts and identify plagiarism in articles using software such as iThenticate. The benchmark offered by most of the well-known publishing organizations runs between 20 and 30%. However, this benchmark may not detect cases of plagiarism, as an experienced and cunning writer can easily rewrite an already published article without leaving any trace of similarity. Moreover, most plagiarism software programmes cannot detect similarities in content or intent to plagiarize. Therefore, a more advanced anti-plagiarism software programme that covers lapses of current plagiarism software should be developed, as this may help significantly prevent ethical misconduct among researchers from occurring.

As another implication, advances in academic pursuits should not be tied to a number of scholarly works and should rather be based on assessments of quality in terms the integrity of published papers. Measures should be put in place by education policy makers and stakeholders to scrutinize the integrity of papers published by university researchers before using the same for the assessment of an author’s KPI. Additionally, in line with Guraya et al. (2016), education stakeholders should outline better policies that foster the publication of research papers that are devoid of research misconduct rather than simply rewarding article publication. This will enhance the responsible conduct of management academic research amidst undue pressures and competition to write articles for promotion purposes and amidst publication-linked incentives facing academics in the field.

From the retracted articles analysed, research misconduct is still common despite efforts made by institutions, governments and funding bodies to encourage research ethics. Invariably, factors promoting misconduct in management academic research might be more of personal than institutional. Hence, we propose that personal factors influencing research fabrication and falsification in management academic research be thoroughly and separately investigated. Importantly, circumstances motivating the intent to engage in research misconduct should not be overlooked. Additionally, work pressures and an eagerness to meet key performance index (KPI) indicators in academia have been proposed as sources of research misconduct in the relevant literature (Corbett et al. 2014; Harley et al. 2014). Insight into causes of the upsurge in research misconduct in 2010 requires further examination; even though some reasons have been posited, further examination could help prevent future spikes. Overall, even though research success is related to the number of articles a scholar publishes in high-ranked journals, researchers should not engage in ethical misconduct or rationalize their engagement in such an act.

Conclusions

Management research misconduct issues culminating in the retraction of an article mainly revolve around plagiarism, falsification and fabrication themes within the field. Promoting research ethics and integrity through the retraction of articles is no doubt a noble initiative. The publication of articles in reputable journals is often desired as a means of exchange scientific information on which critical decisions are based and to advance knowledge in a given field. Thus, researchers must conduct studies based on norms, codes, policies, regulations and guidelines of their professions and set by their employers (universities or research institutions) and governments (the public). Pressures of academic promotion, of securing research funds, and of competition for institutional ranking are not valid reasons for engagement in unethical practices of research publication and in the development of questionable research outputs resulting in the retraction of certain articles. Excellence, integrity, and originality in management academic research writing and publication can only be ensured through the concerted efforts of all stakeholders (authors, reviewers, editors, publishers and university management personnel). Additionally, the academic ethics and integrity of individual sub-fields composing the management sciences and especially those of knowledge management should be separately examined in future studies for further insight. This will further promote ethics and integrity in such sub-fields of academic writing while enhancing the quality of research outputs in the field of management. Retraction initiatives managed by journal publishers are not only meant to ensure integrity in the publishing industry but are also poised to promote research ethics among authors of various management disciplines. This should instill confidence and sustain continuous investment in management academic research.

Limitations

The database of retracted articles used in this study is restricted to only management academic research articles. In addition, the analyses and interpretations of this study are based on the authors’ subjective observations and expertise. Thus, other authors using the same data may draw different conclusions than those presented in this paper.