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Cited by 303

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 25 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Partial least squares path modeling: Time for some serious second thoughts

Open access
Rönkkö, Mikko, McIntosh, Cameron N., Antonakis, John, Edwards, Jeffrey R.·2016·Journal of Operations Management

Abstract

Partial least squares (PLS) path modeling is increasingly being promoted as a technique of choice for various analysis scenarios, despite the serious shortcomings of the method. The current lack of methodological justification for PLS prompted the editors of this journal to declare that research using this technique is likely to be desk‐rejected (Guide and Ketokivi, 2015). To provide clarification on the inappropriateness of PLS for applied research, we provide a non‐technical review and empirical demonstration of its inherent, intractable problems. We show that although the PLS technique is promoted as a structural equation modeling (SEM) technique, it is simply regression with scale scores and thus has very limited capabilities to handle the wide array of problems for which applied researchers use SEM. To that end, we explain why the use of PLS weights and many rules of thumb that are commonly employed with PLS are unjustifiable, followed by addressing why the touted advantages of the method are simply untenable.

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Metadata

Authors
Rönkkö, M., McIntosh, C. N., Antonakis, J., & Edwards, J. R.
Venue
Journal of Operations Management
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2016-06-22
Volume
47-48
Issue
1
Pages
9-27
ISSN
  • 0272-6963 (ISSN-L)
  • 1873-1317
OpenAlex
W2467386812
Cited by
303
References
25
FWCI
30.29
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Partial least squares path modeling: Time for some serious second thoughts. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.jom.2016.05.002
The paper
Rönkkö, M., McIntosh, C. N., Antonakis, J., & Edwards, J. R. (2016). Partial least squares path modeling: Time for some serious second thoughts. Journal of Operations Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2016.05.002

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.