Wednesday, April 25, 2012

How to commit science fraud.

Percolator examines the fraudulent career of Dutch social scientist Diederick Stapel, who was succesful at hoodwinking his fellow professors until younger researchers blew the whistle.

What's interesting is that there is now an effort to study how much of published social science research is "bunk."

If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”

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