I don’t know if it’s ironic or the extreme opposite of irony, but Professor Francesca Gino’s area of experience was dishonesty and cheating in games and other social systems.
3 papers she participated in are already being retracted for alleged data falsification. She was prominent and had a huge impact in the community, with 100 (probably innocent) collaborators now facing the taint of possibly fraudulent research.
I don’t have access to the Fortune article, but there’s been a rolling scandal in the world of honesty research for at least a couple of years now. It’s also engulfed another researcher who wrote a book called “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty”.
If you can’t trust an honesty researcher, who can you trust?
It’s hard to tell if this sort of fraud has become more common in recent years, or if it’s just getting exposed more because of the diligent work of investigators like Elisabeth Bik.
Actually OP, you might contact the mods and broaden the title since research fraud is very common.
Stanford University is one of the most prestigious universities in the world. The president of Stanford was just forced to resign:
And he was outed by a freshman student journalist.
Data Colada has an excellent series of four blog posts about how the fraud was uncovered.
Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake”
Data Falsificada (Part 2): “My Class Year Is Harvard”
Data Falsificada (Part 3): “The Cheaters Are Out of Order”
Data Falsificada (Part 4): “Forgetting The Words”
Gino (together with co-authors) has churned out a remarkable number of papers in recent years - 51 by my count since 2018. Must have quite a case of keyboard finger callus.
Some of her papers have titles that stir one’s irony meter, like: “'‘Many Others Are Doing It, So Why Shouldn’t I?’: How Being in Larger Competitions Leads to More Cheating” and “Case Study: What’s the Right Career Move After a Public Failure?”
I read something about Tessier-Lavigne. To me, it seems that he was hoist on the petard of putting your name on a paper of people in your lab when you didn’t have much (or anything) to do with the actual research. This is endemic in lab sciences. In mathematics, this is essentially unheard of and, while papers with unintentional errors do sometimes get published, it is fairly rare. Our names do not go on papers that we were not strongly involved in.
There was a similar case of a very well known scientist (whose name escapes my increasingly porous memory) who was forced to resign a prominent university presidency when his name was on a paper he had little or nothing to do with that actually did involve research fraud.
PhD, heal thyself.
There is probably a lot of money and reputation at stake. So I don’t know how a postgraduate degree would make you less likely (or more) to manipulate data than the same person as an undergraduate student.
These things are probably hard to detect. But in one case described above, they got data from an insurance company saying how far a bunch of random people drove. With a big sample you would expect something like a normal curve, maybe with a couple peaks for people who drive a short distance to work versus professional truckers. Instead, the data was literally a straight line, which is crazy unlikely. “You don’t know what the data should look like, but you know what it doesn’t look like”, explained the exposer.
An update on Francesca Gino. She’s been accused of plagiarism on top of data fraud.
So much irony there that magnets are attracted to it.
It’s as though Ferrous Bueller should have taken another day off.
Depending on the nature and form of the data, Benford’s Law might help detect fraud.
Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino has many articles and books to her name, including “Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules in Work and Life.”
This seems to be a case of, “I’m so convinced that this is true, I’d be a fool not to do it myself.” I’m tempted to say that it is true only if you don’t get caught but what, really, can they do to her? Sure they can fire her and tarnish her name, but will she be forced to give back her millions. Seems like, unless she has pissed away a lot of money on foolish things, she is already financially set for life. Crime pays.
My college roommate’s had a lot of his work on an assignment plagerized when his professor wrote a paper. My roommate never got any credit for his research since he was just an undergrad. I wonder how common that is.
Curiously reminiscent of the case of evolutionary biologist Marc D. Hauser, who argued for an evolutionary benefit to moral action in his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, and who was forced to resign from Harvard after being found guilty on several counts of scientific misconduct.
This subject could be another thread. Briefly, I think it’s happened a lot in the past because there was no way to check on it.
Another day, another case of plagiarism at Harvard.
This is the kind of thing that completely boggles me. It would have cost the professor absolutely nothing to bring on your roommate as an author on the paper. Now the professor is collaborating instead of plagiarizing, and even being second or third author on a paper as an undergrad is going to be a nice line for a resume or grad school application. Everyone could win.
(I know, in some field sharing authorship can be seen as dilution of credit.)
Recent events and a recap.
The actual news, free of video-bloggery:
https://www.science.org/content/article/honesty-researcher-s-lawsuit-against-data-sleuths-dismissed