Guides

This is a set of guides for students, researchers, and scientists interested in all aspects of neuroscience and data science, including information, advice, and resources regarding grant writing, mentorship, training, internships, teaching, and so on.

Overview

This is curated by the VoytekLab, and some of it will be informal advice but, where possible, we will include links to external resources as well as peer-reviewed references.

On scientific integrity (alphabetical order)

• Amy Cuddy

  • "The idea of "power poses" came from a 2010 Psychological Science study co-authored by Cuddy and two then-Columbia University professors, Andy Yap and Dana Carney. But last Sunday, Carney dismissed everything that Cuddy has been teaching about "power poses." Now an associate professor at University of California, Berkeley, Carney posted on her faculty website that she has no "faith in the embodied effects of power poses... As evidence has come in over these past 2+ years, my views have updated to reflect the evidence. As such, I do not believe that 'power pose' effects are real," her post said. Carney based her revised analysis on "failed replications" of the data and her hindsight view that she and fellow researchers engaged in some aspects of data dredging."

• Francesca Gino

  • "Questions about her work surfaced in an article on June 16 in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a 2012 paper written by Dr. Gino and four colleagues... On June 17, a blog run by three behavioral scientists, called DataColada, posted a detailed discussion of evidence that the results of a study by Dr. Gino for the 2012 paper had been falsified. The blog — by Uri Simonsohn of ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Leif Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joseph Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania — focuses on the integrity and reliability of social science research... in their blog post, Dr. Simonsohn, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Simmons, analyzing data that Dr. Gino and her co-authors had posted online, cited a digital record contained within an Excel file to demonstrate that some of the data points had been tampered with, and that the tampering helped drive the result. Last week's post was not the first time the DataColada watchdogs had found problems with the 2012 paper by Dr. Gino and her co-authors. In a blog post in August 2021, the same researchers found evidence that another study published in the same paper appeared to rely on manufactured data. That study relied on data provided by an insurance company, to which customers reported the mileage of cars covered by their policy. The study purported to find that customers who were asked at the top of the form to attest to the truthfulness of the information they would provide were significantly more honest than customers who were asked to attest to their truthfulness at the bottom of the form. But through analysis of the raw data, Dr. Simonsohn, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Simmons concluded that many of the data points were created by someone connected to the study, not based on customer information. The journal that published the 2012 paper, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, retracted it the month after the blog post appeared."

• Marc Hauser

  • "When former Harvard pyschology professor Marc Hauser was found solely responsible in a series of six scientific misconduct cases in 2012, he distanced himself from the problems, portraying them as an unfortunate consequence of his heavy workload. He said he took responsibility, "whether or not I was directly involved." But a copy of an internal Harvard report released to the Globe under the Freedom of Information Act now paints a vivid picture of what actually happened in the Hauser lab and suggests it was not mere negligence that led to the problems. The 85-page report details instances in which Hauser changed data so that it would show a desired effect. It shows that he more than once rebuffed or downplayed questions and concerns from people in his laboratory about how a result was obtained. The report also describes "a disturbing pattern of misrepresentation of results and shading of truth" and a "reckless disregard for basic scientific standards.""

• Michael LaCour

  • "The "When contact changes minds" study was discredited after a critique by David Broockman, Joshua Kalla, and Peter Aronow on May 19, 2015, titled "Irregularities in LaCour (2014)", concluded that the data had been falsified and no data had been collected. The survey company that LaCour claimed to have used denied performing any work for the study and did not have an employee by the name LaCour listed as his contact with the company. In addition, LaCour had claimed that participants were paid using outside funding, but no organization could be found that had provided the amount of money required to pay thousands of people. The "Irregularities" paper also identified the likely method by which LaCour had forged the data. The baseline survey results appeared to have been taken from an earlier dataset called the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP), to which LaCour had access. The later sets of data appeared to have been simulated from the first using statistical methods to shift the results and by adding normally distributed noise. In addition, the paper noted that canvasser identifiers were missing from the results, making it impossible to verify whether different canvassers produced different results as the original study claimed. Additional evidence of the study's fictitiousness later emerged, such as evidence that LaCour had tried to retroactively claim that the study had been pre-registered using falsified documents."

• Haruko Obokata

  • "Within days of publication of the Nature articles, "disturbing allegations emerged... images looked doctored, and chunks of... text were lifted from other papers." Critics noted that images in the published articles were similar to those published in Obokata's doctoral thesis, the latter involving different experiments than those presented in the Nature publications. In 2014 Riken launched an investigation into the issue, and announced on April 1 that Obokata was guilty of scientific misconduct on two of the six charges initially brought against her. Obokata apologised for her "insufficient efforts, ill-preparedness and unskillfulness", and claimed she had only made "benevolent mistakes"; she denied the charge that she had fabricated results, and denied that she lacked ethics, integrity, and humility. Obokata also reported that her STAP cells existed. The Guardian reported that although Obokata's collaborators initially supported her, "one by one they relented and asked Nature to retract the articles." In June 2014, Obokata agreed to retract both papers."
  • Tragic side-effect of this scandal: her collaborator Yoshiki Sasai committed suicide after this scandal.

• Jonathan Pruitt

  • "An investigation at McMaster University found that Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioral ecologist by training who has had 15 papers retracted in the last three years, "engaged in fabrication and falsification" including duplicating data, according to summarized findings sent to coauthors. Kate Laskowski, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, shared on Twitter the summary McMaster had sent her about three papers she had coauthored with Pruitt. McMaster's investigation found Pruitt "generally failed to meet the requirements expected of a tenured professor" under the university's research integrity policy, and had breached the policy in multiple ways: ..."In brief, the facts submitted established that data and sequences of data were duplicated in all three papers. The Committee was also satisfied that Dr. Pruitt engaged in fabrication and falsification with respect to whether spiders were collected for the study conducted and concerning which spiders were used and whether the assays were conducted to support the papers. The positions advanced by Dr. Pruitt to explain the data and sequence duplication were not accepted by the Committee. The Committee also accepted that there are no statistical or biological explanations for the types of duplication observed in the papers."... Pruitt resigned from a prestigious Canada 150 Research Chair position at McMaster last summer after reaching a settlement with the university, Science reported at the time."

• Jan Hendrik Schön

  • Seven first-author Nature and eight first-author Science papers retracted!
  • "Soon after Schön published his work on single-molecule semiconductors, others in the physics community alleged that his data contained anomalies. Julia Hsu and Lynn Loo originally noticed problems with Schön's paper describing the assembly of molecular transistors while attempting to patent research on lithography, realizing that Schön had duplicated figures. Hsu and Loo had attempted initial experiments to gather evidence for their patent but relied on the scientific outcomes of Schön's work... Lydia Sohn, then of Princeton University, noticed that two experiments carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise. When the editors of Nature pointed this out to Schön, he claimed to have accidentally submitted the same graph twice. Paul McEuen of Cornell University then found the same noise in a paper describing a third experiment... In May 2002, Bell Labs set up a committee to investigate... The committee requested copies of the raw data, but found that Schön had kept no laboratory notebooks. His raw data files had been erased from his computer. According to Schön, the files were erased because his computer had limited hard drive space. In addition, all of his experimental samples had been discarded or damaged beyond repair... They found that whole data sets had been reused in a number of different experiments. They also found that some of his graphs, which purportedly had been plotted from experimental data, had instead been produced using mathematical functions. The report found that all of the misdeeds had been performed by Schön alone. All of the coauthors (including Bertram Batlogg, who was the head of the team) were exonerated of scientific misconduct. This sparked widespread debate in the scientific community on how the blame for misconduct should be distributed among co-authors, particularly when they share a significant part of the credit."

• Diederik Stapel

  • "A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability. The psychologist, Diederik Stapel, of Tilburg University, committed academic fraud in "several dozen" published papers, many accepted in respected journals and reported in the news media, according to a report released on Monday by the three Dutch institutions where he has worked: the University of Groningen, the University of Amsterdam, and Tilburg... "The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found," said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It's almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well." In a prolific career, Dr. Stapel published papers on the effect of power on hypocrisy, on racial stereotyping and on how advertisements affect how people view themselves... More than a dozen doctoral theses that he oversaw are also questionable, the investigators concluded, after interviewing former students, co-authors and colleagues... Dr. Stapel was able to operate for so long, the committee said, in large measure because he was "lord of the data," the only person who saw the experimental evidence that had been gathered (or fabricated)... "We have the technology to share data and publish our initial hypotheses, and now's the time," Dr. Schooler said. "It would clean up the field's act in a very big way.""

• Andrew Wakefield

  • "It was in this context that, in 1998, Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published a now-infamous and retracted paper in The Lancet, following which, in 2010, Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register for misconduct by the country's General Medical Council. The fraudulent work on 12 children promoted a non-existent connection between autism and the MMR vaccine, used against measles, mumps and rubella. It propelled Wakefield to notoriety and turbocharged the anti-vaccine movement. He remains a headliner on the international vaccine-sceptic circuit as diseases once vanquished return because of falling rates of immunization. Many large epidemiological studies have found no difference in risk of developmental delays between children who receive the MMR vaccine and those who don't."

• Brian Wansink

  • "Brian Wansink, the head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, announced last week that he would retire from the university at the end of the academic year. Less than 48 hours earlier, JAMA, a journal published by the American Medical Association, had retracted six of Wansink's studies, after Cornell told the journal's editors that Wansink had not kept the original data and the university could not vouch for the validity of his studies... It was a stunning fall from grace for Wansink, who had become famous for producing pithy, palatable studies that connected people's eating habits with cues from their environment... Wansink's perch at the top of his field began to wobble in early 2017. That's when Tim van der Zee, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, went public with the results of an investigation that began when he stumbled across a blog post Wansink had written on his personal website the year prior... van der Zee was more interested in Wansink's description of the work he was assigning to his postdocs. Those descriptions, van der Zee says, appeared to contain a "strange admission" of "highly questionable research practices."... Indeed, Wansink's lab collected reams of information in its research, often from pencil-and-paper surveys, logging everything from participants' age and gender to where they sat in a restaurant, the size of their group and whether they ordered alcohol... Then they analyzed that data to find connections to what, and how much, people ate. As BuzzFeed News reporter Stephanie Lee found in a trove of emails released through various records requests, Wansink encouraged his students to dig through the numbers to find results that would "go virally big time."