A Suggestion of Fraud


A student, Robert, showed his faculty advisor a graph of his results which indicated a difference between two conditions. Although the effect was small, it supported a theory that the advisor had long been advocating and seemed important. Robert and the advisor quickly submitted a short communication for publication in a relevant professional journal. Soon thereafter, the student took a leave of absence. The advisor decided that the project was too important to wait for Robert's return and so he asked a second student, Marie, to take over. Marie began by reviewing Robert's data and discovered that some data points seemed to have been discarded. Furthermore, there were discrepancies between some of the data points in Robert's notebook and those used in his statistical analysis. When Marie analyzed all of the data in the notebook, the original difference disappeared. Marie reported this to her advisor. What should the advisor do?

The advisor sent an email message to Robert and informed him that he believed that falsification had occurred. He also wrote to the editor of the journal to which the short communication had been sent and withdrew the manuscript. Robert emailed back indicating that he was resigning from the advisor's research group and had made arrangements to join another group when he returned from his leave of absence.

The advisor thought better of his quick decision, tore up the letter to the editor and tried to find Robert. After several weeks he was able to contact Robert (who was recovering from surgery). Robert acknowledged the advisor's concern and explained the discrepancies. Robert had used a statistical test to drop a few data points that were quite far from the mean, and had used a well-accepted weighting factor in transforming the raw data that appeared in his notebook. He apologized for not having made all of this clear in his write-up.
Discussion: Analyze this situation using the guidelines proposed by Bebeau. Be sure to include in your analysis answers to the following questions:

  • Was Robert's advisor properly monitoring the progress of the research?
  • Was it right for him to ask Maria to take over Robert's project without his permission?
  • Was it right for Maria to look at Robert's data?
  • In what ways were the actions of the various parties appropriate or inappropriate in this scenario?
  • What would you have done differently?

  • A problem submitted by MJ Zigmond and BA Fischer to AAAS: Special Section on Conduct.