andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-989 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: Since you have commented on scientific fraud a lot. I wanted to give you an update on the Diederik Stapel case. I’d rather not see my name on the blog if you would elaborate on this any further. It is long but worth the read I guess. I’ll first give you the horrible details which will fill you with a mixture of horror and stupefied amazement at Stapel’s behavior. Then I’ll share Stapel’s abject apology, which might make you feel sorry for the guy. First the amazing story of how he perpetrated the fraud: There has been an interim report delivered to the rector of Tilburg University. Tilburg University is cooperating with the university of Amsterdam and of Groningen in this case. The results are pretty severe, I provide here a quick and literal translation of some comments by the chairman of the investigation committee. This report is publicly available on the university webpage (along with some other things of interest) but in Dutch: What
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 A correspondent writes: Since you have commented on scientific fraud a lot. [sent-1, score-0.36]
2 We have serious suspicions of fraud in a few dozen other articles, some chapters of books and proceedings of conferences. [sent-14, score-0.353]
3 Our first task, determining the size and time span of the fraud will take much longer. [sent-17, score-0.356]
4 Along with a junior researcher: a masters student, a phd student or a postdoc, he would develop a theory with testable hypotheses. [sent-23, score-0.4]
5 In many cases, the junior researcher needed to provide tables summarizing the expected outcomes of the experiments. [sent-26, score-0.299]
6 The experiments were typically conducted (allegedly) in schools or education institutions throughout the country. [sent-29, score-0.242]
7 The junior researcher provided the research materials to Stapel and in many cases he would put these in the truck of his car. [sent-30, score-0.545]
8 After a while the junior researchers received the data from Diederik Stapel. [sent-35, score-0.276]
9 The junior researcher carried out the empirical analysis and wrote a first version of the paper or article. [sent-36, score-0.299]
10 Not only do we find the size of the fraud astonishing -the commission discovered each day something more shocking- but even worse is the personal damage he has caused. [sent-38, score-0.493]
11 The investigating committees have found out that the junior researchers were unknowledgeable of the fraud and had no way of discovering the fraud. [sent-44, score-0.641]
12 The research considered school holidays and the schools (allegedly) only wanted to deal with Stapel himself. [sent-48, score-0.342]
13 Stapel ‘rewarded’ schools (allegedly) with lectures or provided computers, beamers to the schools etc. [sent-49, score-0.322]
14 The schools would not appreciate junior researchers dropping in in their classes. [sent-51, score-0.503]
15 In other instances, he would claim that the paper versions of the questionnaires were not avaiable as the schools nor Stapel could store the paper versions etc etc. [sent-52, score-0.457]
16 When a collaborator would ask for questionnaires or any specifics, Stapel would point out that the close collaboration merited mutual trust. [sent-58, score-0.307]
17 If needed, he would (in a subtle manner) point out that the collaboration was not guaranteed or that a phd position was not 100%. [sent-59, score-0.3]
18 I am always worried that I coded somethin wrong in my research or that my data cleaning or outlier choice may be interpreted as fraud (that is why I keep extensive records of all my research and motivate every step in my code). [sent-69, score-0.444]
19 Given all the fraud in business, government, etc. [sent-98, score-0.3]
20 , it is perhaps no surprise that there is fraud in science too. [sent-99, score-0.3]
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: Since you have commented on scientific fraud a lot. I wanted to give you an update on the Diederik Stapel case. I’d rather not see my name on the blog if you would elaborate on this any further. It is long but worth the read I guess. I’ll first give you the horrible details which will fill you with a mixture of horror and stupefied amazement at Stapel’s behavior. Then I’ll share Stapel’s abject apology, which might make you feel sorry for the guy. First the amazing story of how he perpetrated the fraud: There has been an interim report delivered to the rector of Tilburg University. Tilburg University is cooperating with the university of Amsterdam and of Groningen in this case. The results are pretty severe, I provide here a quick and literal translation of some comments by the chairman of the investigation committee. This report is publicly available on the university webpage (along with some other things of interest) but in Dutch: What
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: A brief update on the Stapel scandal . It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals are sorted out in Dutch politics too) were established to investigate the matter. The first commission to report is the commissie Levelt: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ The most interesting part is this I guess: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined/ This concerns only the articles investigated by that commission. The others (Noort and Drenth) are expected to report in the coming months. I [the correspondent] feel sorry for Stapel, but the amount of fraud is sizeable. I like the way the universities handle this—especially that they are fairly transparent. Interesting. This all seems like overkill given how obvio
Introduction: Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . . . However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. . . . Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel’s publications . . . This brought into the spotlight a research culture in which this sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected
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Introduction: Diederik Stapel gives a Ted talk . Sometimes, reality truly is a parody of reality.
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: Since you have commented on scientific fraud a lot. I wanted to give you an update on the Diederik Stapel case. I’d rather not see my name on the blog if you would elaborate on this any further. It is long but worth the read I guess. I’ll first give you the horrible details which will fill you with a mixture of horror and stupefied amazement at Stapel’s behavior. Then I’ll share Stapel’s abject apology, which might make you feel sorry for the guy. First the amazing story of how he perpetrated the fraud: There has been an interim report delivered to the rector of Tilburg University. Tilburg University is cooperating with the university of Amsterdam and of Groningen in this case. The results are pretty severe, I provide here a quick and literal translation of some comments by the chairman of the investigation committee. This report is publicly available on the university webpage (along with some other things of interest) but in Dutch: What
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
Introduction: Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . . . However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. . . . Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel’s publications . . . This brought into the spotlight a research culture in which this sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected
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Introduction: A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you. Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work. As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces. Wegman Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiari
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Introduction: Yes, it can be done : Hereby I contact you to clarify the situation that occurred with the publication of the article entitled *** which was published in Volume 11, Issue 3 of *** and I made the mistake of declaring as an author. This chapter is a plagiarism of . . . I wish to express and acknowledge that I am solely responsible for this . . . I recognize the gravity of the offense committed, since there is no justification for so doing. Therefore, and as a sign of shame and regret I feel in this situation, I will publish this letter, in order to set an example for other researchers do not engage in a similar error. No more, and to please accept my apologies, Sincerely, *** P.S. Since we’re on Retraction Watch already, I’ll point you to this unrelated story featuring a hilarious photo of a fraudster, who in this case was a grad student in psychology who faked his data and “has agreed to submit to a three-year supervisory period for any work involving funding from the
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Introduction: Uberbloggers Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias were kind enough to link to my five-year-old post with graphs from Red State Blue State on time trends of average income by state. Here are the graphs : Yglesias’s take-home point: There isn’t that much change over time in states’ economic well-being. All things considered the best predictor of how rich a state was in 2000 was simply how rich it was in 1929…. Massachusetts and Connecticut have always been rich and Arkansas and Mississippi have always been poor. I’d like to point to a different feature of the graphs, which is that, although the rankings of the states haven’t changed much (as can be seen from the “2000 compared to 1929″ scale), the relative values of the incomes have converged quite a bit—at least, they converged from about 1930 to 1980 before hitting some level of stability. And the rankings have changed a bit. My impression (without checking the numbers) is that New York and Connecticut were
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: Since you have commented on scientific fraud a lot. I wanted to give you an update on the Diederik Stapel case. I’d rather not see my name on the blog if you would elaborate on this any further. It is long but worth the read I guess. I’ll first give you the horrible details which will fill you with a mixture of horror and stupefied amazement at Stapel’s behavior. Then I’ll share Stapel’s abject apology, which might make you feel sorry for the guy. First the amazing story of how he perpetrated the fraud: There has been an interim report delivered to the rector of Tilburg University. Tilburg University is cooperating with the university of Amsterdam and of Groningen in this case. The results are pretty severe, I provide here a quick and literal translation of some comments by the chairman of the investigation committee. This report is publicly available on the university webpage (along with some other things of interest) but in Dutch: What
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Introduction: An experimental psychologist was wondering about the standards in that field for “acceptable reliability” (when looking at inter-rater reliability in coding data). He wondered, for example, if some variation on signal detectability theory might be applied to adjust for inter-rater differences in criteria for saying some code is present. What about Cohen’s kappa? The psychologist wrote: Cohen’s kappa does adjust for “guessing,” but its assumptions are not well motivated, perhaps not any more than adjustments for guessing versus the application of signal detectability theory where that can be applied. But one can’t do a straightforward application of signal detectability theory for reliability in that you don’t know whether the signal is present or not. I think measurement issues are important but I don’t have enough experience in this area to answer the question without knowing more about the problem that this researcher is working on. I’m posting it here because I imagine t
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Introduction: Joshua Vogelstein points me to this blog entry by Robert Tucci, diplomatically titled “Unethical or Really Dumb (or both) Scientists from University of Adelaide ‘Rediscover’ My Version of Grover’s Algorithm”: The Chappell et al. paper has 24 references but does not refer to my paper, even though their paper and mine are eerily similar. Compare them yourself. With the excellent Google and ArXiv search engines, I [Tucci] would say there is zero probability that none of its five authors knew about my paper before they wrote theirs. Chappell responds in the comments: Your paper is timestamped 2010; however the results of our paper was initially presented at the Cairns CQIQC conference in July 2008. . . . The intention of our paper is not a research article. It is a tutorial paper. . . . We had not seen your paper before. Our paper is based on the standard Grover search, not a fixed point search. Hence, your paper did not come to our attention, as we were not concerned with
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