Will this remarkable, all-encompassing fraud ever get the boot from Oregon State?

[C]itations matter the most, and if you look at the ranking systems, it’s all right there. The Times Higher Education world-university rankings, U.S. News — look at whichever you want, and somewhere between like 30 percent and 60 percent of those rankings are based on citations. Citations are so easy to game. So people are setting up citation cartels: “Yes, we will get all of our other clients to cite you, and nobody will notice because we’re doing it in this algorithmic, mixed-up way.” Eventually, people do notice, but it’s the insistence on citations as the coin of the realm that all of this comes from.

For the most part, the retractions haven’t propagated; work that relied on Sato’s is still up: “His work has had a wide impact: researchers found that 27 of Sato’s retracted RCTs had been cited by 88 systematic reviews and clinical guidelines, some of which had informed Japan’s recommended treatments for osteoporosis.”

Scientific fraud leaves a real mess.

This essay suggests some ways to clean it up.

Every day’s a new… challenge … for the Harvard B School whizkid. She’s already suing the school for 25 mill because some mean people analyzed her work on ethics and uncovered research fraud. Now a different set of mean people have uncovered plagiarism all over her books. Her technique appears to be chiaroscuro — a scattering of pieces from this place and that for an overall intriguing mix of elements which must have caught the eye of the mean people.  “Gino never reached out to me for permission to use my words and my thoughts, something that high school students do on a regular basis when asking if they can use my articles for their school assignments,” said one of her, uh, sources. To which Harvard University says OUCHIE.

Yet there he remains, smiling at you from the University of Rochester faculty pages. Now, if someone years ago had put his dissertation through a simple plagiarism check, UR might have been spared a lot of embarrassment, a black eye with grant-givers, and the drawn-out business of keeping his faculty page up while trying to minimize the possibility that he’ll pull a Gino and sue everyone for $25 million. A summary of the whole sordid tale appears here, but all you need to know is that whether the bully is Marc Hauser (like Francesca Gino, another Harvard winner) or Ranga Dias, or Berislav Zlokovic, let the journal/university/NSF beware: research misconduct is a Thing.

The closer you get, the worse Harvard’s Gino looks. This is from a Vox piece.

[W]hile there are many people who could have manipulated the data for any one of the studies, the only common denominator across all of them — over eight years — was Gino…

Between the dishonesty researchers who have one by one turned out to be dishonest and the cancer research that turned out to be reusing Photoshopped versions of the same test result pictures, the last few years have been full of discomfiting reminders that, yes, some [of the highest-profile] people will cheat to get ahead in science, and we lack a robust process for catching them.

Scientific integrity currently depends on the willingness of individuals to speak out when they see fraud, and it’s precisely that willingness Gino’s [defamation] lawsuit targets.

Background here.

Blame everyone else for the falsification, and sue the pants off the whistle blowers – Harvard’s Francesca Gino, having been outed, plays the cards she’s got.

But once it turns legal, once you make it legal, you run the risk that a judge will decide Harvard’s investigation into your apparently quite extensive research misconduct (and hey take a look at one of your co-authors, Dan Ariely!) should go public.

So we can all read your insistence, in interviews with Harvard’s investigators, that a bunch of incompetent underlings did it; or, if that doesn’t work, a malicious co-author decided to sabotage you.

Ouch. Students at University Nevada Reno are embarrassed. The DEAN of their engineering school “has routinely used the pay-to-publish journal he owns as an outlet for subpar and even nonsensical papers, with the effect of drastically inflating his apparent productivity.” They want the … entrepreneur (more details here) to resign, which he certainly won’t do, and which the school won’t pressure him to do — mainly because it’s just a terrible school, and it’s unlikely to know or care what research misconduct is.

Whooooooops.

One of wee UD’s folk song idols.

… fire.

If you want to get ahead.

Like Donald Trump, one of these two has turned around and sued everyone in sight (for massive damages) for having had the gall to point out fraudulence.

Let’s see what Dan Ariely does. He’ll probably sue too. I mean, go for it. Double down. What the hell.

Background.

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This dude, a notorious, long-term fraudster, has finally been dumped by Florida State. Took them ages.

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The lesson from all of this (and so much more) is: BEWARE SOCIAL SCIENTISTS BEARING STUDIES. But no one ever seems to learn it.

… on which Raskin and a co-signer of the letter sit. They call for an investigation into how it came to be that the committee chair brought disgrace and embarrassment to the committee by enthusiastically sponsoring a witness/whistleblower who turns out to be a career criminal on the lam from the cops.

We are concerned that an official committee of the House of Representatives has been manipulated by an apparent con man who, while a fugitive from justice, attempted to fortify his defense by laundering unfounded and potentially false allegations through Congress. Although [Gal] Luft has been on the run for months, you touted him as a ‘potential witness’ and even prepared to interview him as part of your investigation. As recently as Friday, you described Mr. Luft as ‘a very credible witness’ about matters relating to the President’s son’s financial dealings with Chinese companies.’ … [We ask that you] immediately initiate an investigation into whether the Committee may have been unwittingly duped by Mr. Luft in furtherance of the Chinese Communist Party’s interests [he’s an unregistered agent!], as well as any potentially false statements made by Mr. Luft to Members of Congress or congressional staff.

[Gal Luft] was arrested in Cyprus in February on charges of willfully failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”), arms trafficking, Iranian sanctions violations, and making false statements to federal agents.

He’s currently on the run.

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Wisconsin Republican Senator Ron Johnson claimed on Sunday, before the release of the indictment, that authorities had arrested Luft “to silence him,” and called for the fugitive to be granted immunity. 

You tell ’em, Ron!

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