Daily Archives: June 8, 2013

Professor Gill

Professor Richard Gill
Statistics Group
Mathematical Institute
Leiden University
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~gill/

I am very grateful to Richard Gill for permission to post an e-mail from him (after my “dirty laundry” post) along with slides from his talk, “Integrity or fraud… or just questionable research practices?” and associated papers. I record my own reflections on the pseudoscientific nature of the program in one of the Geraerts et.al., papers in a later post.

I certainly have been thinking about these issues a lot in recent months. I got entangled in intensive scientific and media discussions – mainly confined to the Netherlands  – concerning the cases of social psychologist Dirk Smeesters and of psychologist Elke Geraerts.  See: http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~gill/Integrity.pdf

And I recently got asked to look at the statistics in some papers of another … [researcher] ..but this one is still confidential ….

The verdict on Smeesters was that he like Stapel actually faked data (though he still denies this).

The Geraerts case is very much open, very much unclear. The senior co-authors Merckelbach, McNally of the attached paper, published in the journal “Memory”, have asked the journal editors for it to be withdrawn because they suspect the lead author, Elke Geraerts, of improper conduct. She denies any impropriety. It turns out that none of the co-authors have the data. Legally speaking it belongs to the University of Maastricht where the research was carried out and where Geraerts was a promising postdoc in Merckelbach’s group. She later got a chair at Erasmus University Rotterdam and presumably has the data herself but refuses to share it with her old co-authors or any other interested scientists. Just looking at the summary statistics in the paper one sees evidence of “too good to be true”. Average scores in groups supposed in theory to be similar are much closer to one another than one would expect on the basis of the within group variation (the paper reports averages and standard deviations for each group, so it is easy to compute the F statistic for equality of the three similar groups and use its left tail probability as test statistic. Continue reading →