Brian Wansink, the food marketing researcher who retired from Cornell in 2019 after the university found that he had committed academic misconduct, has published two new papers.
The articles, in Cureus and the International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health, appear to use data that are at least a decade old. Wansink’s only coauthor on the papers is Audrey Wansink, a high school student and, evidently, his daughter. Brian Wansink did not respond to Retraction Watch’s request for comment.
Wansink’s work came under scrutiny beginning in 2016, after he published a blog post that described research practices that sounded like p-hacking to some readers. Other researchers started reviewing his published papers and found many issues.
Cornell’s first investigation cleared Wansink of misconduct. After a BuzzFeed News story that revealed he and his collaborators discussed how to glean positive findings from a dataset in emails, a second investigation found he had indeed committed misconduct. At the time, Wansink admitted to making mistakes and poor recordkeeping, but said there was “no fraud, no intentional misreporting, no plagiarism, or no misappropriation.”
Wansink has had 18 papers retracted, according to our database, one of them twice.
The new paper in the International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health is titled “Parental actions that correlate with preschoolers requesting larger portions of food when away from home.” According to the methods section, the data are from a survey conducted in 2006 in Ithaca, New York, which the Cornell IRB approved.
The Cureus paper, “MyPlate, Half-Plate, and No Plate: How Visual Plate-Related Dietary Benchmarks Influence What Food People Serve,” stated in the acknowledgements that “an earlier version of a similar study was presented as a meeting abstract at the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior conference in August 2012.” The methods section does not say when the data were collected.
John Adler, editor-in-chief of Cureus – a journal with which Retraction Watch readers may be familiar – said in an email to us:
I was unaware of the previous controversies with this author, although in hindsight I now have some vague recollections from years ago. Of course with that knowledge in hand, I might have scrutinized this article even more closely before agreeing to publication. Regardless, the article did go through Cureus peer review process with independent reviewers, and the authors made some changes requested by them.
I obviously don’t have any personal knowledge of Prof Wansink, but my suspicion is that someone like him knows he is being closely scrutinized (and obviously he is….i.e. you) and may in fact now be even less likely to fake data. Moreover he is likely trying to rebuild some of his disgraced brand by publishing again, starting in Cureus, as opposed to JAMA; a little like a former disgraced major leaguer playing semi-professional Baseball!
Article information on the Cureus paper indicates that peer review began on May 9, 2022, concluded on May 16, and the paper was published on the 23rd.
Hat tips: Nick Brown and Leslie McIntosh
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A professional response from the editor. Yes, he did wrong things, and people could agree or disagree on whether he should be in academia (BTW, there is no law prohibiting people from publishing). However, the question is whether the paper he published is wrong. If not, RW stalking should not stop anyone from publishing as long as the papers are correctly executed.
Indeed, one can’t really blame the editor for accepting this paper if he wasn’t aware who the author was. However, the paper should also get an expression of concern from the editor. Otherwise, unsuspecting readers might also not be aware of the background of the author.
Wansink is still using Cornell affiliation, although supposedly retired.
In International Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health it is “Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA” and in the Cureus article “Behavioral Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA”
I guess he is technically a professor emeritus at Cornell?
Not ’emeritus’ per se, according to Cornell he is considered “retired faculty” and Audrey Wansink is “affiliate – BTI” (links below).
Brian Wansink: https://www.cornell.edu/search/people.cfm?netid=bcw28
Audrey Wansink: https://www.cornell.edu/search/people.cfm?netid=abw222
All that being said, I would personally like to actually see the raw data from this. Given some of the concerns regarding previous work by Dr. Wansink, coupled with his blog (& responses on his commentators in the blog!), I am concerned that Dr. Wansink about the data analysis of his papers.
I don’t see any link to the data. That’s on the editor’s loose policies!
Also, can we be please be no more descript about the second author beyond “a family member”? I don’t like the idea of people naming them, especially since they’re in high school. It was a poor decision to include a family member as a coauthor. We should not compound that poor decision.
My speculation is that the publications and coauthorship are to enhance his daughter’s college prospects.
Especially in wake of the ongoing UPenn scandal (https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2022/05/24/the-upenn-admissions-plagiarism-scandal/)
It also calls into question the legitimacy of having secondary/high school students publishing papers before they reach post-secondary institutions and how much it hurts the legitimacy of academia by using these methods as a way to bolster their applications to “get into college.”
I’m not so sure having two publications co-authored with a known fraudster is a good way to enhance college prospects. Then again, some “elite” universities seem to have some rather questionable admission policies, so maybe it is….
What age was the co-author, when the data was collected ? The acknowledgements does not describe the co-author’s involvement in the research and one actually mentions another possible family member Valerine Wansink.
Folks on here might want to look at the article. It’s very bad. It’s poorly written, which is both the authors’ and editors’ fault. The data is also reported very poorly. It’s very good for a high schooler’s article, which is likely who wrote it. But it’s not good for a scientific journal article.
More importantly it reeks of manipulation. There are loads of moving parts to the study yielding very many possible analyses. The results reporting is very selective with a lot of missing information, ignoring most of the collected data.
In the cureus article the disclosure is clearly just copied and pasted from an email from the compliance office. It contains the closing signature from the Emailer.
Eghad! My goodness, that look as though no one at the journal bothered to read that section. And that the authors didn’t bother to revise it, either.
I suggest reading the original blog post from 2016 that started the problems for this author – the original post in it is unbelievable, and his later attempts to justify his actions are a real treat. To use a food analogy, this is a banquet you can feast on over and over again:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170206132854/http://www.brianwansink.com/phd-advice/the-grad-student-who-never-said-no
This was the first case that got me interested in the subject matter of Retraction Watch.
As a retired medical researcher I am wondering what happens to these irreparable people who claim to be researchers. In my day they would never conduct research again!!!!