Faking Scholarly Articles

Can a Longtime Fraud Help Fix Science?

Diederik Stapel faked more than 50 studies in social psychology. What can we learn from his misdeeds?

Tom Bartlett | June 22, 2015

...Now Stapel is known for perpetrating one of science’s most audacious frauds. Since 2011, when his fakery was first exposed, more than 50 of Stapel’s papers have been retracted. He made up data for dozens of studies he never conducted. The extent of his deceit is jaw-dropping, and his downfall felt like an indictment of the field.

[From Wikipedia]
Scientific misconduct
In September 2011, Tilburg University suspended Stapel from his duties, because he was suspected of using faked data for his research publications. The university announced an investigation of his work.
Levelt Committee
On 31 October 2011, a committee entrusted with investigating "the extent and nature of the breach of scientific integrity committed by Mr D.A. Stapel", formed by the Rector Magnificus of Tilburg University and chaired by Willem ("Pim") Levelt, published an interim report regarding Stapel's activities at the three Dutch universities where he had worked. The interim report pointed to three unidentified "young researchers" as the whistleblowers for the case, and implies that these whistleblowers spent months making observations of Stapel and his work before they concluded that something actually was wrong. The report also cites two professors who claim they had previously seen examples of Stapel’s data that were “too good to be true”. The report concluded that Stapel made up data for at least 30 publications. His general method towards the end of his career was to develop a complete experiment at the level of theory, hypotheses, methods, stimuli, questionnaires, and even participants' rewards- and then pretend that he would run the experiments at schools to which only he had access. Instead of doing so, he would make up the data and send these to colleagues for further analysis. 

[From Retraction Watch]

Quick updates on work by two people whose names appear frequently on Retraction Watch: Diederik Stapel and Ulrich Lichtenthaler.
Last month, we reported on the 50th retraction for Stapel. Here’s number 51 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, for “The flexible unconscious: Investigating the judgmental impact of varieties of unaware perception:”

<more at http://chronicle.com/article/Can-a-Longtime-Fraud-Help-Fix/231061/; related links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel and http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (The Mind of a Con Man): further http://retractionwatch.com/category/diederik-stapel/ >