andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1599 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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 The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature.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
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. [sent-1, score-0.149]
2 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. [sent-2, score-0.358]
3 However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. [sent-6, score-0.081]
4 Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. [sent-10, score-0.451]
5 The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. [sent-11, score-0.558]
6 In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel’s publications . [sent-12, score-0.163]
7 The scientific literature must be cleansed of everything that is fraudulent, especially if it involves the work of a leading academic. [sent-19, score-0.125]
8 There’s more: The most important reason for seeking completeness in cleansing the scientific record is that science itself has a particular claim to the finding of truth. [sent-22, score-0.584]
9 This is a cumulative process, characterized in empirical science, and especially in psychology, as an empirical cycle, a continuous process of alternating between the development of theories and empirical testing. [sent-23, score-0.552]
10 My first reaction was that all seems like overkill given how obvious the fraud is, but given what happened with comparable cases in the U. [sent-27, score-0.549]
11 Meanwhile, I’ve been told that George Mason University has appointed Edward Wegman to its Promotion and Tenure Committee. [sent-30, score-0.094]
12 I’d love to hear what goes on in those meetings. [sent-31, score-0.085]
13 Scary to think that someone’s career is in the hands of someone who writes papers by cutting and pasting from Wikipedia. [sent-32, score-0.173]
14 I hear about cases of fraud or theft at Columbia and other universities but the alleged perps seem to stay around forever. [sent-36, score-0.628]
15 Again, for those of you who wonder why I keep bringing up these cases, I agree that my reaction seems too strong. [sent-39, score-0.092]
16 Anil Potti might say, he’s pooping in my sandbox. [sent-42, score-0.088]
17 Although I have a sneaking admiration for his refusal to back down or admit anything, I have no admiration at all for his colleagues at his university and elsewhere who try to push the problem away. [sent-43, score-0.601]
18 I agree with commenter Ryan Shaw below that “cleansing” should mean labeling the fraud everywhere it occurs, not expunging it from the record as if it had never happened. [sent-48, score-0.582]
19 If fraudulent article A is cited in legitimate article B, then the citation for A will always be there. [sent-50, score-0.289]
20 To cleanse here is to label, not to remove all traces of. [sent-52, score-0.163]
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same-blog 1 1.0000002 1599 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-30-“The scientific literature must be cleansed of everything that is fraudulent, especially if it involves the work of a leading academic”
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 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: 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: Ole Rogeberg writes: After reading your recent post , I thought you might find this interesting – especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It’s an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading – with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later – he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike. No idea what’s h
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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
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 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: 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
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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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