Scholarly rumors: Citation analysis of vast misinformation regarding parental alienation theory

Abstract

Misinformation is widespread in political discourse, mental health literature, and hard science. This article describes recurrent publication of the same misinformation regarding parental alienation (PA), that is, variations of the statement: “PA theory assumes that the favored parent has caused PA in the child simply because the child refuses to have a relationship with the rejected parent, without identifying or proving alienating behaviors by the favored parent.” Ninety‐four examples of the same misinformation were identified and subjected to citation analysis using Gephi software, which displays the links between citing material and cited material. The recurrent misinformation reported here is not trivial; these statements are significant misrepresentations of PA theory. Plausible explanations for this trail of misinformation are the psychological mindset of the authors (i.e., confirmation bias) and the authors' writing skills (e.g., sloppy research practices such as persistent use of secondary sources for their information). The authors of this article recommend that publications containing significant misinformation should be corrected or retracted.

Introduction to special issue on advances in forensic mental health assessment

“…We suspect much of this issue will resonate with forensic practitioners and researchers in their daily lives. To give a few examples, Bernet and Xu (2023), enlisting the help of library science, were able to track down the propagation of parental alienation misinformation through generations of scientific publications, one after the other propagating the erroneous information without ever confirming it through the original source. It was a viral meme of sorts jumping from one journal host to the next.…”

Book Review: Challenging parental alienation: New directions for professionals and parents

“…That said, PA is a hotly contested issue (Bernet & Xu, 2022). The Mercer and Drew edited book has engendered attempts by PA advocates to get the book banned, that is, withdrawn from the market, surprisingly even by academics, including William Bernet, retired from Vanderbilt University (Bernet et al, 2023;Harman et al, 2019). See p. 107 August 12, 2022-William Bernet to Claire Jarvis and Jeremy North memo:…”

“…They describe the need for multiple hypotheses when children want to avoid one parent and prefer the other, establishing a protocol for assessing child avoidance or fear of a parent, the incidence and prevalence of child avoidance and fear (no such data exist), querying whether parental encouragement of avoidance by the child is actually harmful. Some PA advocates have actually opined that PA is family violence and child abuse on the same level as other types of child maltreatment (e.g., Bernet et al, 2023). In addition, these coeditors regard as important areas of inquiry whether there are individual characteristics of children that predict children's resistance or fear of contact with the alienated parent, the role of new partners, stepparents, or stepsiblings in resistance or fear of contact, and finally admissibility in court and Daubert standards.…”