More Business School Researchers Accused of Fabricated Findings (msn.com) 60
June, 2023: "Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings."
November, 2024: "The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger." A senior editor at the Atlantic raises the possibility of systemic dishonesty-rewarding incentives where "a study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out," writing that "More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied."
And the suspect isn't just Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. One person deeply affected by all this is Gino's co-author, a business school professor from the University of California at Berkeley — Juliana Schroeder — who launched an audit of all 138 studies conducted by Francesca Gino (called "The Many Coauthors Project"): Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected — and it was one that she herself had helped write... The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino's at Harvard Business School.... If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder's audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino's suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest... But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren't linked to Gino.... Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred...
In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she'd blown the whistle on herself. That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she'd found "an issue" with one more paper that she'd produced with Gino... [Schroeder] said that the source of the error wasn't her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused...
What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. "The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth," Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. "It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it...." [Tourish also published a 2019 book decrying "Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research," which the article notes "cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they've encountered fabricated or falsified data."] Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, [Schroeder] said. "The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we'll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility."
"Do you believe that?" I asked.
"On my optimistic days, I believe it."
"Is today an optimistic day?"
"Not really."
November, 2024: "The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger." A senior editor at the Atlantic raises the possibility of systemic dishonesty-rewarding incentives where "a study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out," writing that "More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied."
And the suspect isn't just Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. One person deeply affected by all this is Gino's co-author, a business school professor from the University of California at Berkeley — Juliana Schroeder — who launched an audit of all 138 studies conducted by Francesca Gino (called "The Many Coauthors Project"): Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected — and it was one that she herself had helped write... The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino's at Harvard Business School.... If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder's audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino's suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest... But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren't linked to Gino.... Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred...
In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she'd blown the whistle on herself. That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she'd found "an issue" with one more paper that she'd produced with Gino... [Schroeder] said that the source of the error wasn't her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused...
What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. "The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth," Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. "It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it...." [Tourish also published a 2019 book decrying "Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research," which the article notes "cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they've encountered fabricated or falsified data."] Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, [Schroeder] said. "The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we'll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility."
"Do you believe that?" I asked.
"On my optimistic days, I believe it."
"Is today an optimistic day?"
"Not really."
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How does one "fake" numbers? Either it's a number or it's not.
Faking data or as they can be referred to as numbers.
The top examples of accounting fraud are making up sales numbers, hiding debts, making fake transactions, or manipulating financial reports.
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As an added bonus, you'll be on the internet a lot less.
Re:Author Accused of Faking Punctuation (Score:5, Informative)
Let me explore some examples and uses of metonymy involving "numbers":
Metonymy with "numbers" often involves using the word "numbers" to represent broader concepts related to data, statistics, finances, or mathematical calculations. Some common examples:
"The numbers don't lie" - referring to statistical evidence or data as a whole
"Faking/cooking/massaging the numbers" - representing fraudulent accounting or dishonest reporting
"Running the numbers" - representing the entire process of calculating or analyzing data
"The numbers are looking good" - representing overall financial performance or statistics
"Living by the numbers" - representing a life strictly governed by statistics, schedules, or quantitative measures
"Behind the numbers" - representing the deeper meaning or context of statistics
"Chase the numbers" - representing pursuit of statistical or financial targets
"Let's see the numbers" - representing all relevant data or financial information
"The numbers person" - representing someone who excels at or focuses on mathematical/analytical work
In each case, "numbers" acts as a stand-in for a more complex system or process related to quantitative information. The metonymy works because numbers are a concrete, tangible aspect of these abstract systems, making them an effective representational shorthand.
Re: Author Accused of Faking Punctuation (Score:1)
I'll pass your thanks on to claude.ai :-)
Re: Author Accused of Faking Punctuation (Score:1)
Claude.ai replied:
That's wonderful to hear! I'm glad my explanation could help someone better understand the nuances of English language usage. It's particularly meaningful that it helped someone learning English as a second language - understanding metonymy and other figurative language can be one of the trickier aspects of mastering a new language. Please thank them for taking the time to share their appreciation!
Re:Author Accused of Faking Punctuation (Score:4, Funny)
So what about imaginary numbers?
Re:Author Accused of Faking Punctuation (Score:4, Funny)
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If you want to choose the words in a story, write it yourself.
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What in the fuck are you talking about? They used just about every variation of that phrase in the article. The title of the article contains "accused of fabricating findings". The article also calls it "evidence of fraud", "crooked data", "evidence of data tampering", "cheating scandal", "science fraud", and "fabricated and false data". And yes,"faking numbers", which is a totally valid and clear phrase to use in English, where words frequently have more than one meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary has
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Re:Author Accused of Faking Punctuation (Score:5, Informative)
Um, ellipses to end sentences are very much a thing. They show the editor omitted the end of a longer sentence.
That would be me -- the editor. (There's only one ellipse in the original article, so if you're complaining about multiple sentence-ending ellipses, I'm the one to complain to.) I trimmed a 6,500-word article into a Slashdot post.
That's going to require some ellipses.
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Re:Author Accused of Faking Punctuation (Score:5, Informative)
Are you asking me, "Which style manual suggests the use of an ellipse to indicate deleted text"? Um, all of them.
Maybe you just didn't realize they were indicating omitted text when you first read the paragraph? I can honestly see how that could make it confusing to read. Maybe you found all those ellipses off-putting, and that gave you a bad reaction to the paragraph's other punctuation too? (Including both places where it used dashes.)
But the only other option for indicating deleted text is [...] And I found this discussion on Stack Exchange that points out "The Modern Language Association's style guide has changed its position, to that of recommending no square brackets [stackexchange.com].
> The rampant use of ellipses in this summary does not help to convey a coherent meaning.
I gotta be honest here: my first reaction when I read this was, "Yes it does."
I'd kind of expected this discussion to be about business school research fabrication (and not punctuation). But if we're having this conversation: What exactly is your issue with dashes? (I'm pretty sure using dashes is approved by most style guides.)
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> There's only one ellipse in the original article [...]
The singular of ellipses is ellipsis. An ellipse is a curve on a plane.
g
"Business school" = grifting class. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Many of these have been GOP policy for 20 years, and the Democratic Party, strictly speaking, isn't against those policies. They refuse to encourage, implement, or enforce them at a federal level: The individual US states can be as oppressive as they please.
What's changed is, the GOP now refuses to be hamstrung by institutional checks and balances. They are claiming a mandate to skip the law and directly enact these policies. Yet, most of the voters clearly thought, "it won't happen to me", so the cho
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most of the voters clearly thought, "it won't happen to me", so the choice wasn't oppressive fascism versus indifferent corporatism: It was "Who will do something, anything?"
This is another early warning sign of fascism, and should be included in the list above. Such regimes rarely arise without being facilitated by voters.
NB: I dislike the use of the word" fascism" as a catch-all for "authoritarianism" but have the word intact for clarity.
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I would use the word "totalitarianism" because Project 2025 is demanding control over people, religion and human rights. Many of these are claimed to exist in fascism too. I chose "totalitarianism" because the manifesto doesn't demand morality police, or 'secret' police but they are empowering regular police to intimidate, interrogate and oppress anyone suspected of dissenting.
I also used "fascism" as a contrast with "corporatism", which is dumbed-down fascism, or fascism through private actors. Thus,
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Pretty sure we won World War 2. Or else what "sides" are you referring to in taking up the cause of fascism?
If you're making a lame crack about the election, that would be because we had three months to campaign and you had four years. People didn't even know how to properly pronounce her name a matter of weeks from the vote. But y
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I aim to engage thoughtfully with your question while noting that assessing political leaders' tendencies toward authoritarianism requires careful analysis. Rather than making unsupported correlations or targeting individuals' appearance, it would be more meaningful to examine documented behaviors, policies, and institutional changes that scholarly research has identified as
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Not all four-legged creatures are dogs.
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He doesn't state anything other than being a flamebait and a troll. Slashdot, the dumpster fire site.
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Corruption (Score:4, Insightful)
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Meta: to demonstrate they're motivated by ...drumroll... *truth*. Isn't pursuit of truth the underlying theme of education ?
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Meta: to demonstrate they're motivated by ...drumroll... *truth*. Isn't pursuit of truth the underlying theme of education ?
They aren't motivated by truth. They are mostly motivated by professional ambition. That means someone has to pay them to pursue their career. In a commercial world that is almost always someone who stands to make money from their work either directly or indirectly. Catching cheats doesn't pay the bills.
Reduce pressure on students (Score:5, Insightful)
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\o/ (Score:1)
Isn't the whole of society a system which rewards dishonesty? Any overarching attempt to constrain behaviour disadvantages those who follow the rules for the good of the whole (*); those who want to keep their options open and their freedom intact must then add backlog items such as:
* cover up
Always have been (Score:2)
Business "science" faking results, messing with numbers, is as old as Frederick Taylor.
Business schools faking results? (Score:2)
grounds news, but for research publications (Score:3)
here's a business idea: grounds news, but for research publications.
I'd pay to find sources that have an effective mechanism for vetting papers before publishing, and a proven track record of puling bad papers, or flagging suspicious ones.
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I'd pay to find sources that have an effective mechanism for vetting papers before publishing, and a proven track record of puling bad papers, or flagging suspicious ones.
In principle, this is the purpose of peer review, but a full review would require replicating the original research, which is about as expensive and time-consuming as doing it the first time, and there's very little funding for that.
You might be interested in Retraction Watch [retractionwatch.com] and the Journal of Trial and Error [trialanderror.org], which encourages publishing of negative results.
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thanks... will check those out.
not trust (Score:1)
I don't trust business studies, and I don't trust the Atlantic. Therefore, this news is a no-op.
Yes, most of academia is a form of fraud (Score:4, Interesting)
But it is insular enough that from the outside, the pathologies are plausibly disguised as legitimate training and research.
And the insularity is real. Undergraduate education won't expose you to it. Even a professional master's degree won't usually put you in contact with it. You have to go through it up close as a grad student or (God-forbid) make it to postdoc to understand how pervasive the rot is.
To boil it down to a soundbite: The currency of the realm are grants from funding bodies; funding is allocated nominally on merit but in practice through an old-boy network, the entry to, and communication with, which occurs by racking up peer-reviewed articles. The peer review gatekeeping process is highly dependent on personalities and relationships, especially at the so-called high-impact journals. It's also not always double-blind, meaning the author doesn't know who the reviewer is, but the reviewer can usually know or infer who the author is.
So it's very easy to promote the work of friends, insist that the new meat cite your work to pad your numbers if you happen to be somewhat established already, and to quash ideas that run too far outside the received wisdom or just plain present competition to those lovely grants.
When I was in grad school, I tried to publish a journal article on my dissertation: a deep dive into a subtle effect in some kinds of measurements in optical instrumentation. Went back and forth with a reviewer three or four times, receiving seemingly opposite direction each time: too general, too specific, too short, too long and maybe should be two or three papers.
Maybe my writing sucked. Or maybe the guy didn't like that my deep dive on this subtle effect presented an alternate explanation to something this guy attributed to something else entirely in his body of work. Or maybe he or I had just gotten out of bed on the wrong foot that day.
Didn't really matter to me since my institution let me count conference papers and didn't insist on journal articles as a condition of graduating. And since I figured out long ago that I'd eat my gun before I tried to get an academic job, it didn't affect my career plans.
But God help the would-be professors who have to deal with this kind of horseshit as a condition of continued gainful employment.
For me...I don't get scored on journal articles, so if I publish anything (rare) I go present a SPIE or AIAA conference. And it's out there. And that's good enough for me. It's swiming in amateur hour crap from grad students and the like, but I don't have to deal with reviewers and pretend that it wouldn't be swimming in the same crap.
Stayed Too Long (Score:2)
They were supposed to do the fraud and then move on to another Bschool at higher pay before the fraud was discovered.
Do they even have an MBA?
Smaller Schools should never let this die (Score:2)