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Absolutely devastating, modern scientific publishing has become more and more of a clusterfuck
Honesty researcher committed research misconduct, according to newly unsealed Harvard report
Internal investigation released during Francesca Gino’s legal proceedings against Harvard Business School
Honesty researcher Francesca Gino “committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly,” according to an investigation completed last year by the Harvard Business School (HBS) that was publicly released this week as part of Gino’s ongoing lawsuit against the university.
On Tuesday, despite objections from Gino, a judge granted Harvard’s motion to unseal the report the university had submitted in its defense, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Gino, who was publicly alleged by three data sleuths to have falsified data in four publications, is pursuing a $25 million lawsuit against Harvard, the school’s dean, and the sleuths, who blog collectively as Data Colada, for damage to her reputation and lost income and career opportunities.
The nearly 1300-page report from HBS includes the investigation committee’s conclusions, as well as hundreds of pages of transcripts from interviews carried out during the probe, written responses to the committee’s questions from Gino and other witnesses, and a report from a forensics firm hired by the school.
Gino’s lawyer challenges the validity of the investigation and the judge’s decision. “I disagree with releasing a one-sided, unreliable, and confidential HR [human resources] document without any context and without opportunity for my client to dispute the factual allegations through the normal process of litigation and discovery,” he said in a statement sent to Science.
Gino’s highly influential work on dishonesty and creativity came under scrutiny in June 2023 after Data Colada published a series of blog posts describing apparent manipulations in the data from four papers published between 2012 and 2020. The bloggers approached Harvard in October 2021 with their findings, prompting a university investigation. Three of the papers were retracted last year, with retraction notices saying HBS’s investigation—which at that time remained confidential—had found “discrepancies” between the published data and those held in Gino’s records. The fourth, a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, had already been retracted in 2021 after the Data Colada bloggers found evidence of fraud in separate data contributed by Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely.
The HBS report reveals that Gino offered two explanations for those discrepancies: that she, or her research assistants, may have made errors in working with the data—or that someone else tampered with the data for malicious reasons. Gino pointed to a particular collaborator—whose name is redacted in the report but who was a co-author on the 2012 paper—as having had both means and motive to sabotage her, saying this author had access to her data files and the software used to gather data, and that she was angry with Gino for not defending her sufficiently from the attacks of another author on the 2012 paper. The unnamed co-author was “friends” with the Data Colada bloggers, Gino said in an interview as part of the investigation.
The HBS investigatory panel did not accept either explanation. “Although we acknowledge that the theory of a malicious actor might be remotely possible, we do not find it plausible,” it wrote in the report. Gino’s “repeated and strenuous argument for a scenario of data falsification by bad actors across four different studies, an argument we find to be highly implausible, leads us to doubt the credibility of her written and oral statements to this committee more generally.” She also did not provide “persuasive” evidence of error, the panel said.
The committee concluded that Gino “engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct, across all four studies at issue.” It recommended that Gino be placed on unpaid leave immediately, and said the university should begin the process of terminating her employment. Harvard has not confirmed any action it has taken against the tenured professor but since June 2023, Gino’s institutional profile has said that she is on “administrative leave.”
In his statement, Gino’s lawyer said, “Harvard found no evidence that Prof. Gino modified data.” Gino’s lawsuit against Harvard alleges that the investigation was “motivated by gender” and that she was treated more harshly than male colleagues. The filing says the university and Data Colada bloggers made “false and defamatory statements.” A crowdfunding campaign to cover Data Colada’s legal expenses has raised nearly $400,000. According to The Wall Street Journal, Harvard and Data Colada will seek to dismiss the case at a hearing in April.
Absolutely devastating, modern scientific publishing has become more and more of a clusterfuck