49 min
What is Truth? STUMP - Death and Taxes
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- Government
In this episode, I look at the most recent revelations re: Francesca Gino’s academia malfeasance, but other tales of academic malpractice. Such as: filling in missing values in datasets with Excel’s autofill functionality, and not sharing data in chemistry/material science or cancer research in what may be fraudulent research. How can we depend on the data and results from what is supposedly hard science research?
Episode Links
Francesca Gino
Science, 9 Apr 2024: Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism by Cathleen O’Grady
Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications.
A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland.
Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books, Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Some passages duplicate text from news reports or blogs. Others contain phrasing identical to passages from academic literature. The extent of duplication varies between passages, but all contain multiple identical phrases, as well as clear paraphrases and significant structural similarity.…Debora Weber-Wulff, a plagiarism expert at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, says Science’s findings are “quite serious” and warrant further investigation by the publishers and universities. HBS and Harvard Business Review Press, which published Sidetracked, declined to comment. Dey Street Books, a HarperCollins imprint that published Rebel Talent, and Guilford Press, publisher of the edited book The Social Psychology of Good and Evil that includes the co-authored chapter, did not respond to a request for comment.
Acland says she decided to “poke around” into Gino’s work in September 2023, after the researcher filed a $25 million lawsuit against HBS and the data sleuths who uncovered the misconduct. Acland focused on plagiarism, rather than data issues, because of her experience detecting it in student work. She searched phrases from Gino’s work on Google Scholar to see whether they matched content from other works.
She says she found apparent plagiarism in the very first sentence of the first work she assessed, the 2016 chapter “Dishonesty explained: What leads moral people to act immorally.” The sentence—“The accounting scandals and the collapse of billion-dollar companies at the beginning of the 21st century have forever changed the business landscape”—is word for word the same as a passage in a 2010 paper by the University of Washington management researcher Elizabeth Umphress and colleagues.
I didn’t talk about the person who found the plagiarism in this case.
This is what gets me so often — the tenured profs just assume nobody will ever check.
For various reasons, perhaps all the top profs shouldn’t assume that anymore. And maybe they should start crediting all their research assistants with the real work…. but that’s for another time.
Prior Gino posts/episodes:
Material Science/Chemistry Non-Replicable Experiment
Chemistry World, 11 April 2024: Holes in the ‘holey graphyne’ story
Recently, the journal Matter published a paper describing a novel form of carbon.2 This purported allotrope, ‘holey graphyne’, is comprised mainly of cyclooctadiyne rings. Moreover, the synthesis was supposedly accomplished using a simple copper catalyst. Typically, the C–C bond-forming reactions of the kind claimed i
In this episode, I look at the most recent revelations re: Francesca Gino’s academia malfeasance, but other tales of academic malpractice. Such as: filling in missing values in datasets with Excel’s autofill functionality, and not sharing data in chemistry/material science or cancer research in what may be fraudulent research. How can we depend on the data and results from what is supposedly hard science research?
Episode Links
Francesca Gino
Science, 9 Apr 2024: Embattled Harvard honesty professor accused of plagiarism by Cathleen O’Grady
Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications.
A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland.
Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books, Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Some passages duplicate text from news reports or blogs. Others contain phrasing identical to passages from academic literature. The extent of duplication varies between passages, but all contain multiple identical phrases, as well as clear paraphrases and significant structural similarity.…Debora Weber-Wulff, a plagiarism expert at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, says Science’s findings are “quite serious” and warrant further investigation by the publishers and universities. HBS and Harvard Business Review Press, which published Sidetracked, declined to comment. Dey Street Books, a HarperCollins imprint that published Rebel Talent, and Guilford Press, publisher of the edited book The Social Psychology of Good and Evil that includes the co-authored chapter, did not respond to a request for comment.
Acland says she decided to “poke around” into Gino’s work in September 2023, after the researcher filed a $25 million lawsuit against HBS and the data sleuths who uncovered the misconduct. Acland focused on plagiarism, rather than data issues, because of her experience detecting it in student work. She searched phrases from Gino’s work on Google Scholar to see whether they matched content from other works.
She says she found apparent plagiarism in the very first sentence of the first work she assessed, the 2016 chapter “Dishonesty explained: What leads moral people to act immorally.” The sentence—“The accounting scandals and the collapse of billion-dollar companies at the beginning of the 21st century have forever changed the business landscape”—is word for word the same as a passage in a 2010 paper by the University of Washington management researcher Elizabeth Umphress and colleagues.
I didn’t talk about the person who found the plagiarism in this case.
This is what gets me so often — the tenured profs just assume nobody will ever check.
For various reasons, perhaps all the top profs shouldn’t assume that anymore. And maybe they should start crediting all their research assistants with the real work…. but that’s for another time.
Prior Gino posts/episodes:
Material Science/Chemistry Non-Replicable Experiment
Chemistry World, 11 April 2024: Holes in the ‘holey graphyne’ story
Recently, the journal Matter published a paper describing a novel form of carbon.2 This purported allotrope, ‘holey graphyne’, is comprised mainly of cyclooctadiyne rings. Moreover, the synthesis was supposedly accomplished using a simple copper catalyst. Typically, the C–C bond-forming reactions of the kind claimed i
49 min