JRSM and SAGE Publishing hereby issue an expression of concern for the following articles:
Eysenck HJ. Suggestibility and Hypnosis—an Experimental Analysis. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 1943; 36(7): 349–354. https://doi.org/10.1177/003591574303600713.
Eysenck HJ. The Measurement of Personality. [Résumé]. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 1946; 40(2): 75–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/003591574604000209.
Eysenck HJ. Personality and Behaviour Therapy. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 1960; 53(7): 504–508. https://doi.org/10.1177/003591576005300705.
JRSM and SAGE publish this expression of concern to alert readers to the articles listed above in relation to a review conducted by King’s College London. The review examined publications authored by Hans J. Eysenck with Ronald Grossarth-Maticek on the subject of personality and certain health outcomes. King’s College recommended retraction of a number of articles based on the following findings:
Concerns with the validity of the datasets, including the “recruitment of participants, administration of measures, reliability of outcome ascertainment, biases in data collection, absence of relevant covariates, and selection of cases analysed in each article.”
The results reported by Eysenck and Grossarth-Maticek were implausible and incompatible with modern clinical science and the understanding of disease processes.
While the King’s College review did not consider the above-listed articles from JRSM, we believe it is important to alert readers to the King’s College review and to the questions about the work of Eysenck and Grossarth-Maticek.
The King’s College London report may be read here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/statements/hans-eysenck.
JRSM and SAGE believe in upholding the highest standards of publication ethics. For more information about publication ethics please consult the ethics section of the SAGE website and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).