RETRACTED: Determinants of proactive and reactive technology licensing: A contingency perspective

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy).This article has been retracted at the request of the Editors-in-Chief.After discussions with the author about concerns raised by readers concerning the papers he published in Research Policy in 2009 and 2010, the Research Policy Editors have decided that the following two papers should be retracted:Ulrich Lichtenthaler, The role of corporate technology strategy and patent portfolios in low-, medium- and high-technology firms, Res. Policy, 38 (2009) 559–569, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2008.10.009;Ulrich Lichtenthaler, Determinants of proactive and reactive technology licensing: A contingency perspective, Res. Policy, 39 (2010) 55–66, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2009.11.011.There are two main grounds for this retraction:(1) In each case, the author failed to disclose (through specific citations, or through a mention in the 'acknowledgements' section, or in a covering letter to the Editor) the existence of other closely related papers by the same author. In the absence of this information, the referees and editors involved in handling these two Research Policy papers were misled as to the level of originality of each Research Policy paper. If they had been aware of those parallel papers, they would almost certainly have concluded that each of the two papers in question did not represent a sufficiently substantial and original contribution to knowledge in its own right to merit publication in a leading journal like Research Policy.(2) In the Research Policy papers and the other closely related papers, the author has been inconsistent in his treatment of the variables. In particular, variables treated as important in the 2009 Research Policy paper are disregarded in another parallel paper (in R&D Management 2009), and vice versa. In the case of the 2010 Research Policy paper, when it is examined in conjunction with three other closely related papers (in Journal of Product Innovation Management 2009, Strategic Organization 2009, and Organization Science 2010), there seems to be an omitted variable bias problem that would invalidate the conclusions of the Research Policy 2010 paper. In both cases, this raises severe doubts as to the validity and robustness of the conclusions drawn in the two Research Policy papers (and indeed in the other parallel papers). If the referees and editors involved in handling the two Research Policy papers had been aware of this (i.e., if their attention had been drawn to the other closely related papers and they had spotted this inconsistency), they would undoubtedly have rejected each of the Research Policy papers on methodological grounds.After the Research Policy Editors had made their decision to retract the two papers (but before he had been notified of the outcome), the author wrote to acknowledge a third problem with the Research Policy 2009 paper, namely that the statistical significance of several of the findings had been misreported. In the light of this new problem, the author asked to withdraw the Research Policy 2009 paper. However, by then the editorial decision to retract that paper on the original two grounds listed above had already been taken.The EditorsResearch PolicyJuly 2012