What Crisis? Taking Stock of Management Researchers Experiences with and Views of Scholarly Misconduct

Abstract

This research presents the results of a survey regarding scientific misconduct elicited from a sample of 1,215 management researchers. We find that misconduct (research that was either fabricated or falsified) is not encountered often by reviewers nor editors. Yet, there is a strong prevalence of misrepresentations (method inadequacy, omission or withholding of contradictory results, dropping of unsupported hypotheses). Despite these findings, respondents put a fair deal of trust in the replicability and robustness of findings being published. A sizeable majority of editors and authors eschew open data policies but sees value in replication studies to ensure credibility in empirical research.

Keywords: scientific misconduct, data fabrication, data misrepresentation, ethics

JEL Classification: K300, A110