A Post Mortem on the Gino Case

Changing some details form obvious reasons: a friend was a postdoc in biology at a top tier UK university. Her boss was a hotshot professor, tons of revolutionary publications under his belt.<p>Her first job when he hired her was to hammer into shape a paper one of his PhD students was writing. Normal stuff, right? Adding literature, polishing off rough edges etc. Except the PhD student seemed really uneasy about the paper, kept talking about issues with the data that needed fixing. At face value, all was great - nice small p-values, great effect sizes etc. Eventually it transpired the PhD student was doctoring the data (these were the issues), was deeply uncomfortable with it, but also understood this is what my friend will be helping her with.<p>At this point my friend goes to the professor to inform him, nicely but firmly, of academic fraud. The prof comes down on my friend like a ton of bricks: who do you think you are, what do you know, I am the hotshot superstar and you are a no-name. All is well with the research and if you press on with the ridiculous accusations, she will be ruined in academia.<p>Well, my friend is a feisty one. She complained of bullying to the university, as an employment thing. The university was desperate not to touch it and in fact encouraged her to lie low, but she wouldn&#x27;t. The whole thing kept escalating in really nasty ways, but eventually wound its way to an employment tribunal. Notably, at this point this isn&#x27;t even about the academic misconduct, it&#x27;s about the professor bullying his employee.<p>At the eleventh hour, the prof quits his job and goes to another, also top tier university. Since he is no longer my friend&#x27;s boss, the case is dropped - no boss, no case. Still, however, no academic misconduct case! My friend, against all advice, wrote a letter to the new university, informing them verbatim of her findings. No response, to this day. The guy is still a top honcho there.<p>Whereas my friend finished her postdoc, didn&#x27;t get another academic position and got an industry job, where frankly, she seems happier.

&gt; The incentives to investigate and call out fraud are non-existent. In fact, the opposite is true: If you find something fishy in a paper, your mentor, colleagues, and friends will most likely suggest that you keep quiet and move on (or as I have learned the hard way, they might even try to bully you into silence).<p>I can’t help but wonder if these mentors are also guilty of fabricating data and don’t want to cause issues that might lead to people looking at their own work more closely.

Friend of mine was working in cryptography. His PhD topic was about proving that a cryptographic scheme was secure (for some definition). It took him two months to break the scheme. Sadly, said scheme was key to the funding of his PhD advisor, so the advisor tried to prevent him from publishing findings.<p>Things end mostly well, with my friend publishing, then restarting his PhD with a different advisor, then leaving academia entirely.

Perhaps relevant to a lot of HN readers - the culture of conference publishing in much of CS (I&#x27;m in computer systems myself) seems to result in significantly different dynamics.<p>Journal papers are single-blind, i.e. the reviewers know the names of the authors and can make decisions based on reputation, so if you publish great (e.g. faked) results once, it becomes progressively easier to do it again.<p>Reviewing for conference papers is typically double-blind - we don&#x27;t know the identity of the authors, and although we can try to guess, a couple of studies show we&#x27;re wrong most of the time. Most papers (65-85% at good conferences) get rejected, so it&#x27;s easy to flush something that looks fishy. (then again, it&#x27;s hard to tell the difference between someone playing games with their numbers and someone who just has the typical crappy CS systems understanding of statistics) The addition of artifact evaluation to a lot of conferences provides another avenue to flush out faked results, too.<p>However conference reviewing <i>is</i> vulnerable to reviewing fraud, since reviewers and authors typically come from the same relatively small community - see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23459978">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23459978</a>, or just google for the words &quot;computer science reviewing cabal&quot;.<p>Reviewing fraud might not be quite as destructive in the long term, as the papers that get published through such fraud are probably more crappy than faked, and will hopefully not get cited. In addition, when reviewing fraud is uncovered it&#x27;s much more of an open-and-shut case - a single person can fake data and make it look a lot like good data, but review fraud requires communication between people who are explicitly barred from communicating on that topic.<p>A lot of it depends on the community, and the size of the community. When you have 1000+ reviewers for a conference things will always get out of hand - I know of someone who got his cat registered as a reviewer for a particular SIG conference that he hated, just to make a point. I assume one could get a lot of fraudulent research published in that particular conference.

I have always wondered if the threshold for &#x27;number of papers published&#x27; to get a professorship is higher than the number of high quality papers that can reasonably published in that amount of time. So, people cut corners and publish bad papers or commit outright fraud. Because they do that, this keeps the required number of publications unreasonably high.

Aviation once had a culture of strict deference to senior pilots, leading to fatal mistakes when juniors hesitated to question decisions. This changed with Crew Resource Management (CRM), which institutionalized open communication and made questioning a normal part of operations.<p>Perhaps academia could benefit from a similar culture shift that actively invites scrutiny to improve science overall? The article implies a deference and bullying problem in research, where junior scholars hesitate to challenge authority, even when they notice flaws. Fraud wouldn&#x27;t be the direct focus of such a shift, but in an environment where questioning is encouraged, it would naturally be harder to commit, with fewer places for bad actors to hide.

As ever I think the bigger problem is grey areas, fooling oneself, etc rather than outright fraud. If you really are self-interested and greedy, you’ll probably choose another career than academia.

Example on a smaller scale - I remember how at uni people who did none of the work could end up with better grades. I remember toiling weeks on a hard &quot;group&quot; project alone, and then my groupmates who contributed nothing got better grades - because from project we all got the same one, and from exams I got worse ones as I had no time to study well.

Better link (the actual post mortem): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theorgplumber.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;statement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theorgplumber.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;statement&#x2F;</a>

&gt; Instead, they repeatedly suggested that a scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation<p>Why not a) finish the dissertation as soon as humanly possible, and b) now that you&#x27;re <i>bona fide</i>, publish a <i>separate</i> paper disputing the famous paper which your dissertation didn&#x27;t rely on?<p>Instead, it sounds like the student and committee advisors were a bad fit and spent most the time in a pissing contest.

There is always a push to do original research. Maybe a partial solution here is that it is encouraged, even required, to take up a major and a minor specialty. The major one you do original research and the minor one you work to reproduce existing research. Building that in from the start would go a long way of creating a culture of trust but verify in these fields.

The New Yorker article from 2023 about this saga is worth a read:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;09&#x2F;they-studied-d...</a><p>Technical details of the fraud can be found in four famous-ish blog posts of the Data Colada group, also from 2023, beginning with:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;109" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datacolada.org&#x2F;109</a>

Fraud is basically the only career path in our current fake economy. Everyone is committing fraud on some form or another. Your company, you personally, your government, etc.

Maybe for the top 1 or 10% folks out there who are good enough at fraud to actually reliably get away with it. For the rest of us, I don&#x27;t think this is true.

I&#x27;m so glad that Zoe Ziani essentially has the last word on this subject.<p>For what it&#x27;s worth, while I&#x27;m sure that her advisors are known within that research community, I believe they deserve to be named and shamed. Their behavior, IMO, is almost as bad as the original fraud to begin with. It was classic &quot;circling the wagons&quot; bullying, and their scientific reputations absolutely deserve the hit that their atrocious behavior warrants.<p>I want to emphasize that this isn&#x27;t about &quot;retribution&quot; or getting back at these people, it&#x27;s about publicizing that their behavior was <i>wrong</i>, the antithesis of what scientific inquiry is about, and was fundamentally rooted in a cowardice that put professional standing on a higher pedestal than scientific integrity. Actions have consequences, and these advisors should face consequences for their abhorrent actions.

Not in academia— I’m curious but not invested.<p>&gt; “I formed the opinion that I shouldn’t use this paper as a building block in my research. […] However, my advisor had a different view…”<p>&gt; “…scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation…”<p>Are these dissertation catechism?<p>Or clash of personalities?

Maybe we should modernize the publishing system for information age. So papers are no longer published in a sense of permanent fixed event but rather tentatively put up online, from where they can be taken down at any point autonomusly by third parties, if they can&#x27;t be replicated, without any say of the original &quot;publisher&quot;.<p>Realying on potentially fraudulent originator that put up the thing to take it down is apparently too much.

There’s a lot that sucks about publishing in security and privacy. But <i>wow</i> this article makes me super grateful that we are still allowed to write attack papers and critique famous works.

Maybe do a series of awards for greatest academic fraud mimicking the Nobel prize.<p>Having a jury dig thought the submissions and scoring everything should be hilarious.

Wasn&#x27;t science supposed to be a set of tools for avoiding lying to yourself about reality, on individual level and as a community?<p>What&#x27;s missing from the toolbox?

Maybe science should be anonymous? Somehow?<p>Or maybe we are gonna be saved by more and more of science getting depersonalized by the virtue of being created by AI?

I think we all realize this is true since a current cult leader is president. With three letters scripting his act.<p>Fraud.

Humans are much, much better at lying than detecting lies. Hence, fraud is a universal problem.

And similarly, corruption is a viable system of government.For a while...

unrelicable! I guess it won&#x27;t become a religious artifact

See also:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;after-honesty-researcher-s-retractions-colleagues-expand-scrutiny-her-work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.science.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;article&#x2F;after-honesty-resear...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;future-perfect&#x2F;24107889&#x2F;francesca-gino-lawsuit-harvard-dishonesty-researcher-academic-fraud" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vox.com&#x2F;future-perfect&#x2F;24107889&#x2F;francesca-gino-l...</a> &quot;In response, Gino — who has maintained her innocence — sued Harvard and the bloggers who first published the allegations, claiming she’d been defamed. &quot;

Always has been.

Not only academic.<p>Look at the 2008 crisis. Only one banker went to jail.<p>Look at Binance’s Zhao.<p>Look at - ahem - Trump.

The_Secret_Ingredient_Is_Crime.gif

&quot;enuf&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t think this is incorrect but it&#x27;s definitely a grey area to spell it this way. It would be ironic to be downvoted for pointing it out based on the intent of the article.

I clicked on the article hoping it&#x27;s about economic fraud. &#x2F;s<p>Alas, fraud was always a viable path. The phrase &quot;fake it till you make it&quot; wasn&#x27;t coined without reason.

Columbia is a bad school (barnard college being even worse).