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Tag: academic integrity

Updates on academic fraud from across the globe

Published by demetriodor on January 16, 2012

The new year starts with some encouraging news! British medical scientists call for stronger action against academic fraud.  “Dishonesty is common and institutionalized in medicine and medical research“, said one of the participants in the conference. Importantly, the scientists want to classify the non-publication of negative results as a serious misconduct, next to plagiarism and data fabrication. In the US, the Office of Research Integrity has censured  for misconduct the director (and co-author) of a researcher who committed plagiarism. Failure to act on suspected fraud is rightly considered an offense in its own right. In China, the president of Zhejiang University is leading a zero-tolerance policy against misconduct. The crackdown was partly motivated  by the discovery of one Chinese journal editor that ‘31% of the 2,233 submissions over that time to her publication, the Journal of Zhejiang University — Science, contained unoriginal material‘. The bad news is that some of the research arguing for the health benefits of red wine has been discovered to be completely bogus. I bet they deliberately waited for the end of the holiday season to announce that!

Academic fraud reaching new heights

Published by demetriodor on November 1, 2011

Academic  fraud is reaching new heights lows. Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel (Tilburg University)  is the culprit this time. A commission looking into the issue came up with a report [in Dutch] on Monday saying that “the extent of fraud is very significant” (p.5). Stapel fabricated data for at least 30 papers published over a period of at least nine years (the investigation is still ongoing, the number can rise up to 150). Entire datasets supporting his hypotheses were made up from thin air. He also frequently gave fabricated data to colleagues and PhD students to analyze and co-author papers together. Diederik Stapel is was an eminent and ‘charismatic’ scholar whose research made global news on more than one occasion. He has been awarded a Pioneer grant by the Dutch National Science  Foundation. He is the man behind all these sexy made-up findings: Power increases hypocrisy Sexy doesn’t always sell Messy surroundings promote stereotyping and discrimination (published in Science!) Meat-eaters  are anti-social What a painfully ironic turn of events for Stapel who also  published a paper on the way scientists react to a plagiarism scandal. The whole affair first came to light this August when three young colleagues of Stapel suspected  that something isn’t quite right and informed the University. What is especially worrisome is that on a number of previous occasions people have implicated Stapel in wrongdoing but their signals had not been followed.  In hindsight, it is easy to see that the data is just too good to…

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