And yet more on the data manipulation affair

Back on October 3rd, we ran some excerpts from a lengthy New Yorker article on the data manipulation affair that touches both Harvard and Duke.* Now, in reaction to that article, there is a lengthy piece by a  former PhD student - Zoé Ziani - describing the pushback which she received when she - who doesn't want to be sued** - began to uncover suspicious aspects of the data used in one of the papers at issue:

...The story so far is very banal. I, a (very) early-career researcher, took a deep dive into a famous paper and discovered inconsistencies. These stories always start with “that’s odd…”, “it doesn’t make any sense…”, or “there is something off here…”. Then, I second-guessed myself, a lot. After all, the authors are famous, serious people; and the paper is published in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal. So I thought “I must have misunderstood,” “I must be missing a part of the puzzle,” “it was probably addressed during the peer review process”… Then, as I finally grew more confident that the issues were real and substantial, I decided to write about them.

What should happen then (if science were, as many people like to say, “self-correcting”) is that, after a peer-review of some form, my criticism would get printed somewhere, and the field would welcome my analysis the same way it welcomes any other paper: Another brick in the wall of scientific knowledge.

As revealed in the New Yorker piece, this is not at all what happened. The three members of my committee (who oversaw the content of my dissertation) were very upset by this criticism. They never engaged with the content: Instead, they repeatedly suggested that a scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation. After many frustrating exchanges, I decided to write a long letter explaining why I thought it was important to document the issues I had discovered in (the paper). This letter stressed that I was not criticizing the authors, only the article, and encouraged the members of my committee to highlight anything in my criticism that they viewed as inaccurate, insufficiently precise, or unfair.

The three committee members never replied to this letter. Given this lack of response, I decided to keep the criticism in the dissertation draft that was shared with them before my defense. On the day of the defense, external committee members called the criticism “unusual,” “unnecessary,” and argued that since I had not run a replication of the study, I could not criticize it. Only one committee member found it “brave and interesting.”

After the defense, two members of the committee made it clear they would not sign off on my dissertation until I removed all traces of my criticism of (the paper). Neither commented on the content of my criticism. Instead, one committee member implied that a criticism is fundamentally incompatible with the professional norms of academic research. She wrote that “academic research is a like a conversation at a cocktail party”, and that my criticism was akin to me “storming in and shouting ‘you suck’ when you should be saying ‘I hear where you’re coming from but have you considered X’”. The other committee member called my criticism “inflammatory,” and lambasted me for adopting what he called a “self-righteous posture” that was “not appropriate.”

At this point, the only option left for me was to cave. I was terrified that they would not allow me to graduate, disgusted to see such a blatant abuse of power, dismayed to think that all the work I had done documenting the issues in (the paper) would be in vain, and absolutely stunned that they did not view the issues I was raising as worth sharing. I ultimately submitted a “censored” version of the dissertation, determined to make the “director’s cut” publicly available online later...

The full story is at https://www.theorgplumber.com/posts/statement/.

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*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-duke-data-manipulation-branch-of.html.

**From the heading of the italicized story above: "Disclaimer: None of the opinions expressed in this letter should be construed as statements of fact. They only reflect my experience with the research process, and my opinion regarding Francesca Gino’s work. I am also not claiming that Francesca Gino committed fraud: Only that there is overwhelming evidence of data fabrication in multiple papers for which she was responsible for the data."

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Note: We have noted that the question of data manipulation is somewhat separable from the question of how Harvard went about dealing with the allegations and whether due process - always important - was applied: https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/10/the-harvard-data-manipulation-affair.html.