In this post I show how one can analyze the frequency with which values get repeated within a dataset – what I call “number-bunching” – to statistically identify whether the data were likely tampered with. Unlike Benford’s law (.htm), and its generalizations, this approach examines the entire number at once, not only the first or…
Category: Fake data
[74] In Press at Psychological Science: A New 'Nudge' Supported by Implausible Data
Today Psychological Science issued a Corrigendum (.htm) and an expression of concern (htm) for a paper originally posted online in May 2018 (.htm). This post will spell out the data irregularities we uncovered that eventually led to the two postings from the journal today. We are not convinced that those postings are sufficient. It is…
[40] Reducing Fraud in Science
Fraud in science is often attributed to incentives: we reward sexy-results→fraud happens. The solution, the argument goes, is to reward other things. In this post I counter-argue, proposing three alternative solutions. Problems with the Change the Incentives solution. First, even if rewarding sexy-results caused fraud, it does not follow we should stop rewarding sexy-results. We…
[21] Fake-Data Colada: Excessive Linearity
Recently, a psychology paper (.html) was flagged as possibly fraudulent based on statistical analyses (.pdf). The author defended his paper (.html), but the university committee investigating misconduct concluded it had occurred (.pdf). In this post we present new and more intuitive versions of the analyses that flagged the paper as possibly fraudulent. We then rule…
[19] Fake Data: Mendel vs. Stapel
Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters, and Lawrence Sanna published psychology papers with fake data. They each faked in their own idiosyncratic way, nevertheless, their data do share something in common. Real data are noisy. Theirs aren't. Gregor Mendel's data also lack noise (yes, famous peas-experimenter Mendel). Moreover, in a mathematical sense, his data are just as…
[1] "Just Posting It" works, leads to new retraction in Psychology
The fortuitous discovery of new fake data. For a project I worked on this past May, I needed data for variables as different from each other as possible. From the data-posting journal Judgment and Decision Making I downloaded data for ten, including one from a now retracted paper involving the estimation of coin sizes. I created…