Stapel Report

The investigatory report on Diedrik Stapel, who was found to have published fraudulent research in at least 30 papers, is out. The committee’s report repeatedly highlights the role of the greater scientific community in allowing this fraud.

It involved a more general failure of scientific criticism in the peer community and a research culture that was excessively oriented to uncritical confirmation of one’s own ideas and to finding appealing but theoretically superficial ad hoc results.

Their recommendations:

In the recommendations, the Committees not only wish to focus on preventing or reducing fraud, but also on improving the research culture. The European Code refers to ‘minor misdemeanours’: some data massage, the omission of some unwelcome observations, ‘favourable’ rounding off or summarizing, etc.

This kind of misconduct is not categorized under the ‘big three’ (fabrication, falsification, plagiarism) but it is, in principle, equally unacceptable and may, if not identified or corrected, easily lead to more serious breaches of standards of integrity. For example, the Committees encountered many aspects of research practice that reveals sloppy science and verification bias. This provides justification for the following recommendations.

Far more than is customary in psychology research practice, replication must be made part of the basic instruments of the discipline and at least a few journals must provide space for the publication of replicated research. Conducting research replications must be included as part of the research Master’s program.

Research data that underlie psychology publications must remain archived and be made available on request to other scientific practitioners. This not only applies to the dataset ultimately used for the analysis, but also the raw laboratory data and all the relevant research material, including completed questionnaires, audio and video recordings, etc. It is recommended that a system be applied whereby on completion of the experiment, the protocols and data used are stored in such a way that they can no longer be modified. It must be clear who is responsible for the storage of and access to the data. The publications must indicate where the raw data is located and how it has been made permanently accessible. It must always remain possible for the conclusions to be traced back to the original data. Journals should only accept articles if the data concerned has been made accessible in this way.

A publication must clearly indicate which co-authors have been completely responsible for the research presented and which are solely responsible for a specific part of it. If no specific indications are included in the list of authors, every author will be deemed to be fully responsible for the research presented.

The Committees recommend that the Dutch and international social psychology disciplines thoroughly reflect on and investigate the contribution to theory development in their discipline, the methodological validity of published social and psychological research as well as the review and other procedures in place for monitoring the theoretical relevance and methodological validity. This investigation can also be of benefit for related disciplines.

It is recommended that, where appropriate, the editors of journals use statistical techniques to identify probable irregularities in the reported results. Since it is likely that in the future that the identification of fraud in this way will become more difficult as fraudsters increasingly may make use of advanced simulation techniques available in standard statistical packages, the importance of complete and accessible data storage, replication research and improved review procedures must also continue to be emphasized.