Issue #95
by Michael Seadle (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
On 19 November 2024, Daniel Engber wrote an article for the Atlantic called: “The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger”.¹ The article discusses the consequences for those who were co-authors on Francesca Gino’s article that was accused of academic fraud. One co-author, Juliana Schroeder (Berkeley), worked with Gino on seven articles and 26 conference presentations. Her reaction was to put together a project to investigate the reliability of data in other papers:
“Schroeder began her own audit of all the research papers that she’d ever done with Gino, seeking out raw data from each experiment and attempting to rerun the analyses. As that summer progressed, her efforts grew more ambitious. With the help of several colleagues, Schroeder pursued a plan to verify not just her own work with Gino, but a major portion of Gino’s scientific résumé.”¹
Instead of exonerating her work, she found more evidence of fraud and unexplained issues in her own spreadsheets. Engber’s article includes a graph of heart rate data so implausible that “... if you were fabricating data, you certainly wouldn’t strive for them to look like this.”¹ Gino was not responsible for all of the bad data. Schroeder acknowledges that she did not check the data herself and speculates that errors by research assistants could have been a source of the problem. Engber writes:
“Schroeder’s leading explanation for the issues in her work—an RA must have bungled the data—sounded distressingly familiar. Francesca Gino had offered up the same defense to Harvard’s investigators. The mere repetition of this story doesn’t mean that it’s invalid: Lab techs and assistants really do mishandle data on occasion, and they may of course engage in science fraud. But still.”¹
Competition could well have been a factor. “A study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out.”¹
The question of responsibility for the fraud goes beyond individual researchers. An important question is why the peer reviewers never caught the problems, especially obvious ones like those Engber includes. If authors feel under too much time-pressure to check their own data, the same pressure was likely true for reviewers. In the end, an academic culture that measures researchers by article quantity deserves a share of the blame.
Changing assumptions is challenging at the best of times, but in an era when “science” in the broadest sense is often ignored or discounted, serious scholars must act, especially those of us who are not at risk.
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Thanks go to Mark Zimbelman of Brigham Young University for bringing this article to my wife’s (and thus to my) attention. Retraction Watch has also picked it up.
1: Engber, D. (2024) ‘The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger’, The Atlantic, 19 November. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/01/business-school-fraud-research/680669/ (Accessed: 23 November 2024).
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