Resolution of Diederik Stapel case

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A correspondent writes:

A brief update on the Stapel scandal. It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals are sorted out in Dutch politics too) were established to investigate the matter.

The first commission to report is the commissie Levelt: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/

The most interesting part is this I guess: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined/

This concerns only the articles investigated by that commission. The others (Noort and Drenth) are expected to report in the coming months.

I [the correspondent] feel sorry for Stapel, but the amount of fraud is sizeable. I like the way the universities handle this—especially that they are fairly transparent.

Interesting. This all seems like overkill given how obvious the fraud is, but given what happened with comparable cases in the U.S., I suppose this “Powell doctrine” approach (overwhelming force) is probably the best way to go. If someone wants to argue that the plagiarism of an Ed Wegman or a Frank Fischer or a Laurence Tribe is acceptable behavior or that it is a minor infraction compared to their great contributions to the world, go for it. But it’s good to have a simple finding of fact, as they did in the Netherlands. Too bad it had to take so many people’s time. We can add that to the social cost of Stapel’s fraud.

Some commenters wonder why I keep bringing up these cases. One reason is that they never seem to be resolved, so it seems good to keep the reminder that these actions have occurred and that the perpetrators remain in place. At least Quentin Rowan admitted it (sort of). Some of the others out there seem to be taking the Chris Rock approach.

8 thoughts on “Resolution of Diederik Stapel case”

  1. Well, it was obvious that there was fraud but the extent was unclear. Not every paper that Stapel co-authored was fraudulent. Of the 20 papers that were under scrutiny by this committee, 8 were not deemed to be fake. This is information important enough to spend time on getting. If we just blindly discard everything with Stapel’s name on, the harm that he caused would be even bigger.

  3. Since each item begins with “According to Mr. Stapel: fraudulent,” I suppose you could say the rest is moot. But enumerating the other signs of fraud is potentially a useful service if the goal is to learn something about what fraud looks like and maybe catch it sooner in the future.

    For example, “effect size measures are unreasonably high, all F’s smaller than 1 when no effect is expected” sounds pretty bad when you call attention to it. But it’s not the sort of thing editors or reviewers (or even naive co-authors) tend to look for or notice on a day-to-day basis. And there aren’t widely agreed upon standards for when a pattern like that crosses over from merely-unusual to suspicious. Combine that with the fact that suggesting that someone is committing fraud is a pretty socially aggressive thing to do, and you start to get a sense of how this might have gone on so long.

  4. I say a major reason Plagarism / Fraud isn’t caught is that nobody cares. 80% of academic papers probably get fewer than 10 downloads. Most reading is cursory and hardly any replication.

    Nobody catches fraud because nobody reads papers.

  5. Some academic frauds seem harder to detect than others.
    See this for discussion.
    Copy-paste-trivial-edit (i.e., Wegman+Said+students style plagiarism) is the easiest to see and prove, once found.
    It is especially clear because it cannot be accidental “meant to quote this, sorry” material.

    Various forms of falsification/misrepresentation can be harder, as more domain knowledge is required.

    If there is falsification/fabrication of lab data (as opposed to misrepresentation of others’ work, as per Ward Churchill), I think that can really take expertise and a lot of work to prove.

    But, even the simplest plagiarism can take a long time, as in See No Evil at George Mason University, and with strong willpower, people can avoid seeing anything they do not wish to see. But that one isn’t over yet, and unlike many cases, that one has potential mis-use of Federal funds and perhaps felony/conspiracy underneath, rather higher stakes than the usual plagiarism cases.

  6. Well, I’m glad they are publishing this, so that there will be a clear record of which papers are based on fraudulent research. I taught an advanced social science course this january-march, which culminated in review papers written by the students. Two of them used papers by Stapel in their argumentation – one which I was quite certain was fraudulent – but, of course, nothing was noted on the articles that they downloaded.

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