This blog mostly focuses on IR, but this story has implications for all doing social science, as the accuser at the center of the conversation asserts quite clearly. So, I am posting the latest and most thorough account of how this played out thus far here.
There are many questions to ask, but the one asked directly in the piece is: how does one deal with flawed work? Attacking the quality of research is one thing–that is what lit reviews are all about–but the integrity of scholars? As the piece suggests, that is tricky business indeed.
This is not the end of the story by any means, but I think it is a bit clearer now.
your thoughts?
I find it incredibly baffling. Sadly, but realistically, he could’ve probably gotten away with that sort of fraud if he’d been planning to push out unremarkable papers that largely uphold previous findings, just because most people will ignore them anyway. But he wanted to go straight to the top of the field – published in Science, high media publicity, post-doc at Princeton. Surely he must’ve known that such a career trajectory would bring very tough scrutiny with it, and that faking a whole survey and study would not hold up for very long? As the article mentions, you wouldn’t even have to examine the internals of his study for the first indication of fraud, as there’s a huge red flag right there in his CV. Claiming that he’d hauled in over $700,000 in grants as a totally unknown grad student is about as plausible as saying that he’d bred and sold unicorns to pay for the survey.
I guess the upside is that the system did work to detect a case of extremely brazen fraud, but Broockman’s comments on how he was discouraged from probing further at virtually every opportunity are concerning. I wouldn’t have expected people to be so afraid of rocking the boat in the case of such a prominent and remarkable study, which should’ve naturally invited critical interest.
I think it is one thing to criticize a study for having problems and another thing entirely to question the integrity of someone. But the NYMAG piece definitely raises troubling questions that we need to think about.