In a post entitled, “How Institutional Failures Undermine Trust in Science: The Case of a Landmark Study on Sustainability and Stock Returns,” Andy King (my collaborator on the project on scheduled post-publication review) tells a disturbing story of the failure of the scholarly publication process:
For a long time, I [King] resisted the accumulating evidence that our institutions for curating trustworthy science were failing.
I believed our academic gatekeepers–editors, reviewers, and research-integrity officers–were quietly doing their jobs. Overstretched, but nevertheless, curating a trustworthy scientific record and correcting it when problems appeared.
That belief ended when I attempted to replicate an extraordinarily influential article “The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance,” by Robert Eccles, Ioannis Ioannou, and George Serafeim. The paper has been cited more than 6,000 times. Wall Street executives, top government officials, and even a former U.S. Vice President have all referenced it.
Uh oh . . . I have a horrible sense that I know what’s coming next:
It contains serious flaws and misrepresentations.