Celebrating Failure: Learning lessons from a leading consumer behavior journal’s retractions

Purpose: A retraction is the removal of a published article from scientific record. It an admission failure. Yet, every retraction, regardless its cause(s), instructive. Using oxymoron/concept celebrating failure, this study investigates retractions in Journal Consumer Research ( JCR ). Method: The content each notice was examined to determine initiator(s) retractors, reason(s) for and time-to-retraction. Findings: According findings, issued ten notices between June 2012 October 2020. generated together, up April 11, 2022, some 18,378 pageviews, 3,944 PDF downloads, total Altmetric Attention Score 36. authors retracted articles initiated four processes. retractors were five cases. most common reason with occurrences, “data analysis anomalies”. took 947.6 days on average be withdrawn. Originality: Instead pointing fingers assigning blame, list lessons learned based these findings dressed up. These apply entire ecosystem, including authors, editors, peer reviewers, readers, owner, publisher.