More Business School Researchers Accused of Fabricated Findings

June, 2023: 'Harvard Scholar Who Studies Honesty Is Accused of Fabricating Findings.'
November, 2024: 'The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger.' A senior editor at the Atlantic raises the possibility of systemic dishonesty-rewarding incentives where 'a study must be even flashier than all the other flashy findings if its authors want to stand out,' writing that 'More than a year since all of this began, the evidence of fraud has only multiplied.'

And the suspect isn't just Francesca Gino, a Harvard Business School professor. One person deeply affected by all this is Gino's co-author, a business school professor from the University of California at Berkeley — Juliana Schroeder — who launched an audit of all 138 studies conducted by Francesca Gino (called 'The Many Coauthors Project'):

Gino was accused of faking numbers in four published papers. Just days into her digging, Schroeder uncovered another paper that appeared to be affected — and it was one that she herself had helped write... The other main contributor was Alison Wood Brooks, a young professor and colleague of Gino's at Harvard Business School.... If Brooks did conduct this work and oversee its data, then Schroeder's audit had produced a dire twist. The Many Co-Authors Project was meant to suss out Gino's suspect work, and quarantine it from the rest... But now, to all appearances, Schroeder had uncovered crooked data that apparently weren't linked to Gino.... Like so many other scientific scandals, the one Schroeder had identified quickly sank into a swamp of closed-door reviews and taciturn committees. Schroeder says that Harvard Business School declined to investigate her evidence of data-tampering, citing a policy of not responding to allegations made more than six years after the misconduct is said to have occurred...

In the course of scouting out the edges of the cheating scandal in her field, Schroeder had uncovered yet another case of seeming science fraud. And this time, she'd blown the whistle on herself. That stunning revelation, unaccompanied by any posts on social media, had arrived in a muffled update to the Many Co-Authors Project website. Schroeder announced that she'd found 'an issue' with one more paper that she'd produced with Gino... [Schroeder] said that the source of the error wasn't her. Her research assistants on the project may have caused the problem; Schroeder wonders if they got confused...

What feels out of reach is not so much the truth of any set of allegations, but their consequences. Gino has been placed on administrative leave, but in many other instances of suspected fraud, nothing happens. Both Brooks and Schroeder appear to be untouched. 'The problem is that journal editors and institutions can be more concerned with their own prestige and reputation than finding out the truth,' Dennis Tourish, at the University of Sussex Business School, told me. 'It can be easier to hope that this all just goes away and blows over and that somebody else will deal with it....' [Tourish also published a 2019 book decrying 'Fraud, Deception and Meaningless Research,' which the article notes 'cites a study finding that more than a third of surveyed editors at management journals say they've encountered fabricated or falsified data.'] Maybe the situation in her field would eventually improve, [Schroeder] said. 'The optimistic point is, in the long arc of things, we'll self-correct, even if we have no incentive to retract or take responsibility.'

'Do you believe that?' I asked.

'On my optimistic days, I believe it.'

'Is today an optimistic day?'

'Not really.'

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