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F, F, and P.

With Marc Hauser as background, Gerald Koocher, in an NPR interview, spells out some categories of research fraud.

… The kinds of things that the federal government focuses on for federally funded research is mostly what’s called F, F and P: fabrication, which is making up data out of whole cloth; falsification, which is modifying your data to fit your needs; or plagiarism, passing off someone else’s work as your own.

But we are also concerned, for example, about questionable authorship practices, where you take credit for something that someone else really did most of the work on or where you list an honorific author in the hopes that their prestige will get you published, or when you are careless, such as sloppy record keeping, or when you intentionally rig your samples so that – or your methods so that you bias the results; when you don’t adequately supervise your research assistant so that some mistakes are made and never detected, and inappropriate data gets incorporated in the analyses…

Margaret Soltan, August 22, 2010 11:35PM
Posted in: ghost writing

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2 Responses to “F, F, and P.”

  1. Mr Punch Says:

    The Hauser case, it seems to me, has been legitimately problematic. Hauser has long been criticized for over-interpretation of his findings – drawing conclusions not supported by the experiments. (I’ve heard the word “charlatan” used on this basis alone.) He’s in trouble now because he also over-interpreted the data itself, seeing what he wanted to see. This is a version of falsification (especially after he was called on it) but may not be conscious fraud.

    The situation is complicated by the fact that this is psychology, and straddles the line between experimental and speculative approaches. The university can’t apply a uniform standard across disciplines; if it did, the entire Art History department would be under investigation, and people like Stephen Greenblatt would be long gone. There can’t even be a uniform standard for psychology. In that light, Harvard’s handling of the case, relying on disciplinary structures (including funding agencies) and increased oversight, appears reasonable, as far as it goes. The end game remains in question.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Mr Punch: Funny!

    Although whatever results Art History gets, they’re unlikely to do serious harm to humanity.

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