Wow, I thought I was already pretty cynical about this stuff, but this updated me another notch (emphasis mine):
Second, what about Gino’s co-authors and reviewers? While we might never know how many of her papers contained fabricated data, she has published 130+ papers over the course of 17 years, with approximately as many co-authors. Each of these papers was presumably assigned to two or three reviewers, one editor, presumably an associate editor too, for multiple rounds of reviews. What should we make of the fact that no one saw (or said) anything?
Some of Gino’s co-authors worked extensively with her. A dozen of them were regular collaborators, who wrote 5+ papers with her. Some of them are junior scholars, and are most likely under intense stress, dealing with the fallout of having a regular co-author suspected of data fabrication. We cannot fault them for staying quiet and dealing with these issues first. However, I am very disappointed with Gino’s more senior co-authors. It is shocking to me that, Juliana Schroeder excepted (who has sent a clear signal to the scientific community that she is taking this scandal seriously, and shared transparent guidelines on how she is evaluating the papers she has co-authored with Gino), none of these tenured co-authors have made any sort of public statement. Do they not think that the scientific community deserves more transparency? Do they not feel the need to signal whether and why people should still trust their work? I still have some hope that the repeatedly delayed Many Co-Authors project will shed some light on these questions… but I’m not holding my breath.
Finally, the journals and HBS deserve to be called out. The former for publishing Gino’s research, the latter for providing her with the resources that helped her become the superstar she was before her downfall. Now that it appears that some of Gino’s research was based on fabricated data, why aren’t they actively investigating all her papers? Why aren’t they helping the co-authors, and the rest of the scientific community, figure out the truth? After Diederik Stapel was terminated for research misconduct, Tilburg University conducted a comprehensive investigation into the entirety of his research output, and made the findings public. Why won’t HBS and the journals do the same thing? The silver lining is that HBS at least conducted an investigation and acted decisively, unlike Duke university after Data Colada [98] came out…
Wow, I thought I was already pretty cynical about this stuff, but this updated me another notch (emphasis mine):