Even Legitimate Researchers Cut Corners

The discovery that the Dutch researcher Diederik A. Stapel made up the data for dozens of research papers has shaken up the field of social psychology, fueling a discussion not just about outright fraud, but also about subtler ways of misusing research data. Such misuse can happen even unintentionally, as researchers try to make a splash with their peers—and a splash, maybe, with the news media, too.

Mr. Stapel's conduct certainly makes him an outlier, but there's no doubt he was a talented mainstream player of one part of the academic-psychology game: The now-suspended professor at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands, served up a diet of snappy, contrarian results that reporters lapped up.

[Via The Chronicle]