More work by a group of researchers at the University of Maryland with nine retractions due to concerns about participant consent is under investigation, Spectrum has learned.
The requirement that consent is obtained from potential research participants has been a requirement of codified research ethics standards from at least the 1950s. It has been arguably an expectation of clinical research standards for much longer than that. The failure to meet this fundamental principle of human research ethics can result in research outputs being retracted. Too many scandals and controversies in Human Research Ethics and Research Integrity involve researchers failing to obtain sufficient consent from participants or not acting when a participant withdraws their consent.
Earlier this month, a psychology journal retracted eight studies conducted by editor-in-chief Dennis Kivlighan Jr. and his colleague Clara Hill because of failure to obtain participant consent. The journal’s publisher, the American Psychological Association (APA), also retracted a paper from another title, with eight more retractions planned for the rest of the year. Kivlighan and Hill are both professors at the University of Maryland in College Park.
The initial batch of retractions came after an investigation by the University of Maryland Institutional Review Board found that the studies used data from between one and four people “who either had not been asked to provide consent or had withdrawn consent for their data to be included in the research,” according to the retraction notices.
The nine papers that have been retracted so far were published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology and Dreaming. The eight other planned retractions will appear in those titles as well as in Psychotherapy; no additional papers in APA journals are being investigated, according to an APA journals representative.
