The case of Jonathan Pruitt, a spider researcher suspected of fabricating data in potentially dozens of studies, keeps getting weirder.
Pruitt, according to our count, now has six retractions. Currently associate professor and Canada 150 Research Chair at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, he made a name for himself by providing other scientists with field data — much of which now appears to be unreliable.
Among the latest developments in the case is a correction in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, for a 2016 article titled “Behavioural hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment.” That followed this April expression of concern, which read:
Following the publication of ‘Behavioural hypervolumes of spider communities predict community performance and disbandment’ Proc. R. Soc. B 283, 20161409 published 14 December 2016, it has been brought to the attention of the Editorial team that there are concerns regarding this study.
An investigation into these aspects is under way, and the journal is, therefore, issuing an expression of concern and will notify readers as to the results of our investigation as soon as possible.
Evidently, those concerns didn’t strike the editors as enough to warrant retraction. Instead, they issued the following correction:
The authors of this correction re-examined data generated by co-author J. N. Pruitt that contributed to the conclusions of the 2016 publication cited above, in a file not originally published with the paper. The file included waiting times (in seconds, ranging from 0 to 600) for individual spiders to initiate a behaviour. We found that certain integers (34, 45, 56, 67, 78 and 89) were substantially over-represented relative to adjacent integers, beyond what would be expected from reasonable statistical distributions. In the light of this over-representation, D. I. Bolnick, A. Sih, N. DiRienzo and N. Pinter-Wollman remove their authorship from this paper.
Nick DiRienzo, the third author of the article, expressed his displeasure with the journal on Twitter:
We emailed the journal for an explanation, but have yet to hear back. [See update at end of post.]
Meanwhile, Pruitt appears to be gearing up for a legal fight. According to Science, his lawyer had been sending letters:
to some co-authors and journal editors, cautioning them to let misconduct investigations at Pruitt’s current and former universities play out before retracting any more of his papers. In addition, an online spreadsheet quickly established to track analyses of the integrity of the scientist’s 160 papers has been taken offline.
Several researchers have posted on Twitter about having received Freedom of Information requests from Pruitt, demanding that they and/or their institutions turn over documents in which his name appears.
Kate Laskowski, whose January 2020 blog post detailed her concerns about Pruitt’s data in a joint paper, told us that she was aware of at least six people who have received FOIA requests from her former co-investigator:
As far as I know, I personally have not received a FOIA request for my emails. As to what the letters contain, I have seen two of the requests and they appear fairly broad – requesting emails that mentioned “Jonathan Pruitt” .
Pruitt did not respond to a request for comment.
Update, 1300 UTC, 8/24/20: The Royal Society’s publishing director, Stuart Taylor, tells Retraction Watch:
Our investigation has confined itself to the scientific aspects of the article and its data. The Editors investigating the article do not feel that the COPE conditions for retraction have been met and that a correction may be acceptable. While this correction is awaited, the expression of concern remains in place. Once the correction is received, if it is considered scientifically sound the EoC will be removed. If it is not, then the article will be retracted. The fact that some of the authors now no longer wish to have their names associated with the article is not – in itself – grounds for retraction.
It is important to understand that our editors have considered each of the articles co-authored by Jonathan Pruitt on its own merits since there are clearly different factors involved in each case. For your information, two have already been retracted as the concerns identified met the COPE threshold, three have been cleared as unproblematic and three still have EoCs in place pending a final decision once corrections have been received and evaluated.
The Society refused to say whether Pruitt had threatened them with legal action.
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“rounding the values to the nearest increment of five and reanalyzing”?
That would just make the numbers 35, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 overrepresented instead of 34, 45, 56, 67, 78 and 89. But maybe I’m missing something. In any event, this would mean consenting to making weird data look less weird — or weird in some other way. It certainly does not solve the problem of abnormal patterns in the original data.
I think the idea is to create bins ([31-35], [36-40], etc.). This could make sense if, for instance, you can’t rely on measuring time very precisely. Which I imagine is what Pruitt claimed: something along “oh, I couldn’t measure time super precisely, so I just put 34 if it was a bit less than 35 seconds” (note for his lawyers who might be reading this: I’m not saying this is a quote! Don’t sue me!).
Seriously, this is messed up. I can’t recall many instances in which a faculty lawyered up and was in the right.
If you are trying to obscure statistical anomalies, rounding the numbers isn’t going to help.
I suggest pouring ketchup on the data. It will make them more attractive and more palatable.
Just a clarification: most of the data anomalies that I have read about involve data from laboratory studies (not “field data”) that were supposedly carried out by Pruitt and then forwarded to his unsuspecting collaborators. Pruitt has done work on wild spiders in the field, but I believe that the Laskowski and similar retractions were due to anomalies in data from lab studies.
Also wanted to say thanks to RW for following up on this story. Please write more about it: there is surely much more to come, especially from McMaster University where they are supposedly investigating this whole mess. This scandal involving a Canada 150 Research Chair is a big deal: McMaster has exactly one of these prestigious long-term lucrative appointments, and they seem to have squandered it on a self-described “fast talker” who talked himself into numerous possibly fraudulent collaborations with a large network of unsuspecting colleagues. It’s all sad and outrageous.
What I don’t understand is why, if one is determined to produce phony data, one would apparently do so by—as it were—hand-crafting it. Surely everyone knows that people are very, very bad at making up sequences of “random numbers”. If you are a serious fraudster, and want to deceive others (such as your innocent collaborators) with figures that could “be expected from reasonable statistical distributions”, then go to the minor bother of choosing some “reasonable statistical distribution” for the problem at hand, and using software to produce samples from it! And, whatever you do, don’t try to “improve” those samples to look ‘more random’.
Meh. Pruitt maybe two lazy to figure how to create a macro using Excel to generate noise. Not the first time I’ve see faculty be a little shaky with data management. Pruitt should have hired some professional fraudsters with experience here, and if he had, his power would have only continued to increase.
Think of the number of people that are competent in generating noise in data that are not getting caught.
In the end, I think a lot of people benefited from Pruitt and his excel magic, as it allowed them to get faculty positions, that they would have not gotten with boring negative results that could not be published. He appears to have been a boon to others. If only he had not been caught!
It’s true that Pruitt’s coauthors could have been more skeptical of his data. And it’s true that those probably fraudulent papers made some of his collaborators look better on paper than they would have. But there is zero evidence that those collaborators “[got] faculty positions…that they would have not gotten” without those papers. People like Laskowski and Pinter-Wollman have great CVs without their Pruitt collaborations. And those individuals have been leading the effort to investigate Pruitt’s data and retract papers. Charging them with getting faculty positions they did not earn is careless at best and contributes nothing to the conversation about what Pruitt did. The really interesting question is whether Pruitt himself would have secured a Canada 150 Research Chair without the benefit of those probably fraudulent papers. That’s one the investigators at McMaster should be asked to answer.
Mike, here is where you are probably wrong: according Laskowski at her website she is an assistant professor. Her blog suggests that Pruitt generated the data (why didnt she go to his lab and get it herself?) and was co-author with her on at least 3 pubs as far as I can tell on google scholar, who was a well known and respected researcher at the time. Therefore, IMO, it is imaginable she may not have received the quality or number of offers that she received if this had not happened. As for Pinter-Wollman, she is an associate professor, but with multiple co-authorships with Pruit (again, did she collect the data? If not, why didnt she go to his lab and do it?), which would have helped her greatly in promotion if Pruitt had not been caught. Do your homework, Mike.
Yes of course I know Laskowski is an assistant professor. That makes Pruitt’s actions arguably worse than his effects on Pinter-Wollman and other more senior collaborators. I know Laskowski’s colleagues at UC Davis. They would have hired her without those papers on her CV. No one in her department is second-guessing that decision. [/homework]
Maybe *you* think you should have got that job at UC Davis, but if you want to make a case for that you should do it instead of running down Laskowski and her reputation. This comment thread is not the place for insinuating that Laskowski is anything but a victim of Pruitt’s bad actions.
There is no insinuation from me, Mike, that Laskowski is anything but an outstanding scientist as suggested from her blog and her analysis of Pruitts data, and her forthrightness with bringing this to light. I am saying that she likely gained advantage over other candidates because of the Pruitt collaboration, and she would have likely had a less prestigous position without it. I am just being intellectually honest about this, as you should be. I guess she could ask the school to rescind her tenure track position and she could reapply, which IMO, would set things right, but this will probably not happen.
Again, why doesn’t she go to other labs and collect the data herself? She got a lucky break here, apparently. I know that I have to collect my own data and am not lucky enough to have someone else do if for me. Influence, its nice if you have it, isn’t it, Mike?
I wouldn’t know about influence. All I know is that implying corruption on the part of Laskowski, and suggesting she should give up her job, is both unhelpful and ludicrous.
Mike: again, I am not implying Laskowski is corrupt, as I said above. Again, what I am saying is that she probably benefited from the Pruitt co-authorships when she looked for a faculty position, and some other candidate may have gotten the job instead of her and enhanced CV. I’m just be intellectually honest, and the ethical move is for the school to rescind her position, and do another nation-wide search for a faculty member, that she can be a part of.
I can only imagine that perhaps you, as a faculty member (I presume you to be), see this as beneath the dignity of what a faculty member should be accorded. Not surprised here with that at all, as all the faculty I have met feel they deserve special treatment because they have achieved this position. I doubt if Laskowski feels this way, but if she did, this is even a better reason for her position to be rescinded and for her to reapply. If she (or any body else) wants that high status, let her (or them) be on a level playing field, which she was not on originally (through no fault of her own).
@Mike, your defense against Laskowski is just unhelpful and ludicrous. Three paper is a good number of papers, and it’s clear that gave her an advantage over any candidate if she had not gotten those papers. It’s true she wasn’t aware of the fraudulent data but she was partly to be blamed for biased judgment in asking Pruitt to collect data for her. Her blog suggests that she asked Pruitt to provide data matching her theory or “hope”
Passive aggressive attack on anon for he/she being bitter about not getting the position UC Davis reflects poorly on your character. If you’re a member of the faculty, that somehow implies Laskowski’s hiring may be not based on merit but influenced by other factors. Again, not your argument is not helpful for her at all.
I’m the “bitter anon”: no, I’m not even in the field of evolutionary biology and insect personality: I’m disillusioned about how some get so lucky to get papers practically thrown on them and all they have to do is write it up, and that pads their CV making them more palatable for escaping eternal post-doc-dom and get a decent job. I myself was recently in a situation where I was the poor bastard doing all of the bench work for a project and I did not receive anything but a 3rd authorship on two papers, due to my advisors decisions.
With things as currently as hyper-competitive as they are, this is the kind of stuff that can render you a post-doc for life, which, Laskowski, by very good luck, appears to have avoided. Again, I am assuming she is, and she appears to be, an outstanding scientist, but she got unfair advantage over other candidates because of this. If the work was correct, then I would shrug and say that she got very lucky; however, this is not the case: the work is wrong, and I am outraged by the unfairness to other candidates who were not on a level playing field with her, and would like to see some correction because of it.
I had to check the Urban Dictionary entry.
“Anon. [noun] Member of a subpopulation of academic researchers who ascribe their career failures to the undeserved success of other researchers. See ‘incel’.”
Nah, I’m kidding, I’m sure you all were treated most unfairly, and you should all be UC Davis professors.
Wow, @Mike. Your posts above are a perfect description of what many people on the american right suspect: academic faculty as being elitists that are to be treated with more respect and dignity than others in the system, and who themselves are smug and quick to assign individuals who don’t “make it to their level” as failed scientists. Would you care to say anything more to the future Trump revolutionaries? Go right ahead….
IDK what this has to do with American politics, but sure point taken: lots of American conservatives and Trump revolutionaries would probably not like me, even if they did not know anything about my work. I can live with that. Just to clarify: you don’t know anything about me either.
I didn’t call the Anons “failed scientists.” I alluded to their “career failures”, which the Anons themselves described, and which I guess everyone has experienced. At least I have, along with successes, and I guess the Anons have had both career successes and career failures.
But sure second point taken: I should not assume from the Anons’ self-descriptions as “bitter” and “outraged” that they see themselves as failures. Maybe they see themselves as struggling against a corrupt system in which they are virtuous protagonists assailed on all sides by bad actors with unfair advantages. Of course IDK anything about the Anons other than that they are unreasonably focused on Pruitt’s unwitting collaborators, and are advocating for a tax on the careers of those collaborators for no apparent reason other than to assuage the Anons’ own feelings of having been treated unfairly by the system. Or something like that, who knows.
I’m making fun of the Anons here because of their wildly inaccurate assumptions about Laskowski, who published three articles based on Pruitt’s apparently fraudulent data and has worked hard to retract those papers and publicize the retractions, and their insinuation that she has some kind of inside influence (I have no idea) or that I do (nope). And because the Anons don’t seem to mind (or at least have said nothing about) the fact that Pruitt himself published a couple dozen apparently fraudulent papers, and have not bothered to make a similar argument about how Pruitt might have used that inflated cv to get his previous job at UC Santa Barbara or his current job at McMaster. It would be easy (but pointless) to guess why the Anons are so focused on Pruitt’s collaborators rather than on Pruitt himself.
On a more positive note: maybe RW could follow up on this thread with a story about the effects of retractions on the wider community of researchers in a particular field (like the ecology of social groups and animal personality). It’s evident from this comment thread that some people not directly involved in the research or in the retractions feel that their own interests have been indirectly damaged by the apparent data fraud, and feel that the retractions should be followed by some kind of redistribution of opportunities for career advancement, e.g., “[Laskowski’s] position [should] be rescinded and [she should] reapply”. Like a tax on the ill-gotten gains of Pruitt’s unwitting collaborators, with a tax refund going to the population of “other candidates who were not on a level playing field with her”. The existence of such feelings and suggestions is notable, and they seem worth exploring and understanding.
Mike,
No need to be upset.
Many don’t want to say it, but it is somewhat obvious that those who managed to get faculty positions or promotions (before the pruitt hit the fan) benefited from it, while students and post-docs likely directly suffered.
And there is a good chance that there are some who suffered indirectly because one of the co-authors with juicy pruittpapers on their cv got the job they were applying for. There may have been nothing intentional behind it, but that does not make it right. We will probably never know for sure.
Rescinding jobs may be a bit much, but the benefit some have gained is real and a matter of logic.
I want to echo exactly this statement.
It is entirely reasonable to assert that Laskowski is an ethical, competent, and professional scientist but that she received her position based partially on data that appears to have been fraudulent. I don’t know that I would rescind her position, but the frustration is understandable, and I think there is a case to be made. It is not an outlandish thing to suggest.
Mike strikes me as the kind of person who “doth protest too much”… Mike, is there any chance you have been publicly revealed to have had the wool pulled over your eyes in the very recent past?
Another possibility is that Pinter-Wollman benefited if she went up for tenure around 2017 or 2018, right before a lot of papers from her and Pruitt came out. They have a lot of papers together. 2016 would have looked pretty empty for her without Pruitt!
https://pinterwollmanlab.eeb.ucla.edu/sample-page/
Crime pays handsomely in science, especially if you don’t get caught. But it looks like others will greatly benefit even if you do get caught!
@Legume Not upset. This is kinda fun in a bleak way.
I return to these comments because they seem to be an interesting look into the dark heart of academics. The Anons are sure that someone out there suffered damage to their career prospects but there is no evidence that this is the case. Were those three Pruitt papers really the difference between Laskowski versus some other candidate getting that UC Davis job? It is impossible to know, and no amount of “bitter” (to quote one of the Anons) conjecture will answer the question. One could ask Laskowski’s colleagues at UC Davis. They are a famously aggressive and brilliant group of people, so it would be quite entertaining to listen to them excoriate the Anons for their baseless insinuations about “influence” and “crime” on the part of Pruitt’s unwitting collaborators in some pubic venue like this comment thread. But it’s too much to hope for that I’m sure.
So what do the Anons (or any of us) expect to come out of all this spiteful conjecture? “I don’t know that I would rescind her position, but…there is a case to be made.” A case for what exactly? Although Legume doesn’t think so, some of the Anons do think Laskowski should give up her job and reapply for it along with those who came close but didn’t get an offer because they were missing apparently fraudulent Pruitt papers in their CVs. If she doesn’t volunteer to do so, then what? For a minute just now I had fun trying to imagine the civil litigation that the other short-listed candidates might bring to force UC Davis to reopen that job search. Ludicrous doesn’t come close to describing what that litigation would look and sound like.
Because there is no remedy for this particular type of indirect damage that was caused by Pruitt’s apparent malfeasance, it is hard to understand what the point is of the Anons’ criticism of Pruitt’s victims; it seems like useless victim blaming; and it seems to serve only as an outlet for the bitter and angry feelings of the Anons. It may be true that the Anons have good reasons to feel this way — they may have been treated badly by the system, and if so they have my sincere sympathy. It’s a tough environment for early-career scientists for sure. Angry postdocs have become a feature of the academic landscape, and many of them have good reasons to be angry. But Laskowski (and Pruitt’s other unwitting collaborators) is the wrong target for the expression of those feelings. And that makes this comment thread seem more like an opportunistic pile-on, and less like an “intellectually honest” expression of concerns (again to quote one of the Anons).
Finally, it is notable that the Anons don’t seem to mind that Pruitt himself got two jobs (!) in part on the basis of a large number of apparently fraudulent papers. Why are the Anons so focused on Pruitt’s collaborators and on taxing their career success? This comment thread is already up to its knees in wild speculation (for the record I haven’t had the wool pulled over anything, though it’s fair to say I may protest too much, and I have work to do that I’m not getting done while I entertain myself in this comment thread). So I’m going to dive in head-first and suggest that the Anons’ commentary has a whiff of misogyny in its focus on Pruitt’s female collaborators and its indifference to Pruitt himself. As Bobarella says below, I think there is a case to be made.
Bitter anon here: Mike, as I would expect from a privileged member of the faculty/academia/1% *cough* (an R1 research university faculty ?), you accuse me of misogyny because I am making an accusation about the treatment of someone (Laskowski) who happens to be female, yet I never once said “she was treated this way (got the job) because she was a woman”. IMO, not unexpected from your ilk, to suspect sexist motives on my part, where there is no evidence of this… its R1 research faculty virtue signaling as I would expect. Congrats, you will get a promotion and maybe become dean or provost.
In all likelyhood, Laskowski got the job over other candidates due to a pretty clear undue advantage that she had over others with three fake papers on her resume, as Pinter-Wollman may have gotten tenure due to the very same thing (again, assuming she was up for tenure in 2017-2019, I have no idea). Yes, this is speculation, but certainly not undo. Its not wild speculation at all, and it all seems pretty reasonable. For you to suggest that this is wild speculation makes me question how intellectually honest you can be, or are you just too mind-controlled by the academy you want to defend to utter what is likely the truth?
What Pruitt did is horrible, and, if in fact that is the case, he needs to be fired and ostracized from science. At most, for Laskowski and Pinter-Wollman, they should have to reapply for their current positions, which is nothing that Pruitt may go through, so no, I am not favoring Pruitt at al.
You don’t have the whiff of superiority, Mike: you actively show with your comments equating post-docs who don’t make faculty as failed scientists who are incels. That being said, I can only hope that you base the incel comment on some knowledge of evo psych (you are a biologist, right?) that suggests that sex for males is more available to men of high status (ie, faculty vs post-docs). If you truly believe that, some would argue you are the clear sexist here. OTOH, if you are likening a post-doc who does not get a faculty position to an incel as a societal loser (low class man unworthy of respect), then you are clearly an elitist who shows little empathy. I suspect you are one of these guys who cant imagine the luck they had to get where they are, and maybe that explains why you don’t see Laskowski and Pinter-Wollman as lucky.
@ Bitter Of course I don’t think you or the other Anons are sexists. But even though the accusation is not true it still stings doesn’t it? I offered that baseless conjecture to make a point that it’s harmful to engage in this kind of groundless speculation and accusation. I didn’t expect to get a nibble so fast, but away we go.
It may be true that the Anons would have made these same criticisms even if Laskowski and Pinter-Wollman were not females; it also may be true that Laskowski would have been offered that UC Davis job even if she had not been an unwitting victim of Pruitt’s seeming fraud. In both cases there is no way to know. Laskowski can’t prove she would have got that job without those papers, and the Anons can’t prove they are not sexist. But once this kind of unevidenced insinuation is made it can’t really be taken back, it damages the conversation about sexism (on the one hand) and about scientific achievement (on the other hand), and it creates bad feelings among people like us having a conversation because you now suspect me of bad faith because I made a conjecture about you that is not true for no good reason except to score points in a discussion thread. My suggestion that the Anons are sexist is harmful and useless and based on no evidence in the same way that the Anons’ suggestion that Laskowski would not have got her job without those 3 papers is also harmful and useless and based on no evidence.
The difference is that in this anonymous comment thread no one knows me or the Anons and so no harm done IRL, whereas Laskowski and Pinter-Wollman are real people with reputations and feelings who have done no wrong here and have put lots of time and effort into making things right. And their reward (at least in this comment thread) is to be the butt of innuendo and sarcasm and told to give back their jobs. That’s hurtful and wrong, and the Anons should stop doing that.
It may be that I’ve also made the Anons the butt of my own sarcasm, and perhaps I should not have done so. The incel thing seemed very funny to me at the time, but I can see that it didn’t advance the conversation and it only made some readers upset, so I apologize unreservedly for that one.
I understand that it’s maybe easier to ignore what I’m saying here by assuming that I’m some elitist top dog who looks down on postdocs. In the hope that you’ll reconsider my point here, I’ll just say that your assumptions about me are not true (1%, R01, evo psych, etc.). I’m just someone who is interested in the Pruitt story and its various threads. The one developed in these comments is very interesting.
All these statements are not wrong – these people did benefit from these papers, but its not like they got the papers “for free”. They represent real intellectual work by them – even if the data was fake, the work they put into it (thinking up the ideas, analyzing, writing) was presumably very real. If they do end up being found somehow to be complict, then fine, let’s all pile-on them about how they operated this illicit publication ring to get ahead. But based on the effort they’re going through to try and clean this mess up, I’d say they were duped just like the rest of us and they’re doing the damn best they can. Fine, talk about collateral damage, this whole situation is truly a tragedy and there is collateral damage a plenty, but don’t suggest that these folks are shady characters somehow. This all reeks of victim blaming. I hope that I’d have the same integrity as them if I was put in the same situation.
The problem with your comment is that the people you are calling “victims” actually benefited by gaining publications that might have led to their hiring.
Assuming that the seemingly fraudulent studies did indeed contribute to these “victims” being hired, then the true victims (i.e., the ones who suffered the most adverse consequences) are actually the people who might have been hired had these seemingly fraudulent studies publications not been published.
Hiring is a zero-sum game because there are only a fixed number of positions. So your statement is tantamount to saying that when “you rob Peter to pay Paul”, Paul is actually the victim. I’m sorry to inform you that *Peter* (i.e., the person who did not get hired due to the fraudulent publications) is the greater victim of the two here.
I am a postdoc in an unrelated field. I have sunk papers where the data or analysis was suspect before submission because I checked the data before submission.
In all likelihood, I will not obtain a tenured or permanent academic position.
But I don’t resent Laskowski or other innocent collaborators at all. You can’t always check absolutely everything. Some things look fine at first pass – I am lucky that the fraudsters I worked with were so unsophisticated as to leave an obvious trail. We -have- to trust our students, colleagues and collaborators otherwise we we’d be spending all day watching our data collection on CCTV. So I appreciate sometimes someone will break that trust.
If an innocent collaborator gets an advantage during job hunting, the advantage is likely to be small and indistinguishable from random variation and luck. It’s also clawed back with interest by the time they’ve had to sink into cleaning up the mess. The big effects are the jobs occupied by fraudsters themselves – the bad practices they perpetuate and the money they waste. The unfairness that I and other early career researchers will suffer because of fraud is almost all due to the actual fraudsters taking those jobs, becoming famous themselves and polluting the literature with fake effects we waste time trying unsuccessfully to replicate. The negligible boosts to innocent collaborators is the career equivalent of someone accidentally bumping into you on a crowded footpath. Don’t let it ruin your day.
I’m not. I already have a tenure-track position, so there’s no sour grapes on my end. And as I said, I don’t think Laskowski’s position should be rescinded. But I also don’t think that the people arguing that it should be rescinded are being absurd.
Treating retracted papers as “fruit of the poisonous tree” for which a coauthor’s position is rescinded (even if he/she benefited unknowingly), resulting in him/her being thrown back in the candidate pool in a competition to regain his/her position is not an obviously absurd stance.
The question of how the academic community should handle cases like these is a good one, and I don’t think the “she must be fired” or the “she must not be fired” people have a completely solid case.
Mike,
Some quick points:
1) Sexism seems unlikely – I haven’t done any counts, but aren’t many (equally many?) of Pruitt’s coauthors male?
2) Why do you think “Anons don’t seem to mind that Pruitt himself got two jobs (!) in part on the basis of a large number of apparently fraudulent papers.” As far as I can tell, _Everyone_ minds, a lot.
3) There’s little connection between incels and people who point out that more papers help people get academic jobs.
4) Pruitt’s coauthors are not villains. Nor are they heros, in my opinion.
LW
Thanks Legume.
1. Yes I agree sexism is unlikely (as I conceded earlier).
2. Ok, yet the comments here are focused on the coauthors not on Pruitt.
3. Sure fair point about incels (as I conceded earlier this was my bad). But the comments don’t merely say more papers help get jobs; they specifically argue that without those three papers Laskowski would not have got her current job. As they say in court this assumes facts not in evidence.
4. Nobody says the Pruitt coauthors are heroes. They are behaving admirably in lousy circumstances that were caused by Pruitt. Again the palpable resentment of these coauthors is hard to understand coming from the Anons. The Anons were not part of the apparently fraudulent research and were not involved in the retractions or in the job searches (at least none have claimed to have been directly injured by Pruitt’s actions). But for some reason the Anons are still bitter and outraged about the career successes of Pruitt’s coauthors, and feel entitled to call for Laskowski to lose her job. Again the Anons might have good reasons to be disillusioned and angry about the obstacles to career success for postdocs, but Pruitt’s coauthors are the wrong target for expression of that disillusionment & anger.
Hey Anons, do you realize there is a flaw in your logic?
Had KL and NPW not worked with Pruitt, they would not simply have 3 (in the case of KL) fewer papers on their publication list. They would have used the time working on other projects and would have got publications from them. You cannot say they had an unfair advantage for their jobs search / tenure dossier, because you do not know what they would have produced in the absence of Pruitt — certainly not nothing.
KL said on her blog that the general idea came from someone else, she thought about applying it to spiders (I guess that’s novelty), and she got someone else to collect the data. Even better, the data were strong positive results that were consistent with her hypothesis that could easily be published in a good journal! How awesome is that?
I don’t think there is as much time invested here say, as trying to get your own data, and the likely hood your data will probably not work, much less perfect results proving your hypothesis is correct! Only in the promiscuous world of R1 faculty fraud *sigh*.
So, yes, a clear advantage for KL. Worked great.
The leap from “had three extra papers based on possibly fraudulent data” to “wouldn’t have been offered that job without those three extra papers” requires assumptions that no well-trained scientist on this comment thread should be willing to make. And yet FSI and other Anons just can’t give it up. It seems worth someone trying to find out why not (I’m looking at you RW).
I always have found the word “trained” as a scientist ironic, as I have found in my failed scientist career (working for 5-6 different advisors as a post-doc) that I was never trained by an advisor…I had to figure out almost everything (ideas, data collection, finding the narrative) pretty much on my own. Never -ever-ever had an advisor teach me any kind of technique I use in the lab, they are too busy being glued to their computers writing grants.
I imagine the word “trained” works well for faculty and tenure applications, when you can say you were “trained” in a famous-persons lab. Which, probably, didn’t amount to any kind of real training at all, except what not to do if you are lucky enough to get a decent job.
IMO, more opprobrium should be directed toward Pinter-Wollman than KL. PW had so many papers with Pruitt, which undoubtedly were instrumental to her getting tenure (in 2018?), yet has anyone questioned her poor data analysis skills? OK to miss 1-2 fraudulent data sets, but at the rate papers are being retracted, she must have been slapdash at best in her analysis methods. But she now has a tenured position. I hope she has learned lessons from this sorry saga, and is now prioritizing quality over quantity. Darwin wept.
In my field, data collection, having results that are positive and support a hypothesis that can be published, and trying to find an attractive and compelling narrative for the results so a nice story can be told are what is needed to pass reviewer scrutiny and getting papers published. In my field, these are the steps that take months to years to pass through. This seems to have been avoided, at least in part, by KL with the Pruitt data; I’m not sure about P-W, but it could be the same here. I guess these individuals, because they likely had some ambition to progress in their careers, made them ripe for this scam.
This kind of reminds me of the recent surgisphere / hydroxychloroquinone fraud where Mehra at Harvard, one of the authors of the now retracted Lancet paper, was offered a ton of fake data from Desrai without asking questions. He probably knew that this would have been a big deal that would have promoted his career even further.
It pays well NOT to be a careful scientist in science; that is what I have found in multiple instances in my generating solid reproducible data yet failed science career, which has rendered me an incel. Plenty of sex for those who cheat or who are fooled by cheaters to advance in their career I suppose.
Just checking in for my daily dose of unverified assumptions and bitter recriminations. Bonus points for the Darwin shout-out!
Hi, Mike. I’m also doing my daily check-in.
You still haven’t responded to my question above. Sure seems like you’re protesting a lot. (Even asking RW to look into the commenters.) Any chance you’ve recently been publicly revealed to have been extraordinarily gullible and that’s what’s got you on the defensive?
Talk to you tomorrow.
“Any chance…”? Asked and answered (search upthread for “wool”). I may be gullible – who knows – but haven’t been publicly revealed recently.
Not defensive, just very interested.
But I should clarify: I don’t mean RW should investigate commenters here. That would be terrible.
I mean that there seems to be an interesting story here about a population of disaffected researchers who feel their interests have been damaged by the career success of others who coauthored apparently fraudulent papers but committed no fraud themselves. There might be many such individuals associated with many other cases of fraudulent publication. It’s why I keep returning to this comment thread: the phenomenon seems interesting; RW sometimes writes feature stories about aspects of publishing and retraction like this; and I hope they follow up with a story about this population of researchers.
I have often said if you got rid of the serious fraudsters and the deadwood faculty, 50% of the faculty would be gone. Opening up a lot of positions for honest careful researchers. The later lose in this environment.
Do you have a method for predicting which members of the “honest careful” pool of applicants will not turn out to be fraudsters and will not become deadwood? If you don’t then this proposition will just swap one mixed group of people (some excellent, some deadwood, some frauds) for another similar mixed group. If you do then you could probably set up shop as a university hiring consultant.
Well well well, what is going on here?
I have diagnosed a certain deficiency and recommend a minimum of 4 copulations a week for all commentators above. Some benefits may be achieved via self-fertilization if the above is not achievable.
Come back to me when you have kept that up for two weeks.
Do not resort to faking data. That will not help.
Here is a new case: “Editorial Expression of Concern” in The American Naturalist concerning an article from 2012. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/714867