For our next Meth Lab meeting, this Thursday at noon, we are going to talk about scientific fraud.

As many of you probably know, this summer there were some revelations of high-profile fraud cases in psychology, both of which resulted in the resignation of the accused researchers (Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University, and Lawrence Sanna at the University of Michigan). Both were caught when Uri Simonsohn, a psychologist at Wharton, investigated statistical anomalies in their published studies.

Here is a link to a working paper by Simonsohn (under review at Psych Science) that details his method for detecting improbable results. That paper will be the focus of our discussion.

In addition, if you aren’t up on the fraud cases, here are a few links with some supplemental background information:

News report on Smeesters’s resignation:
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/06/rotterdam-marketing-psychologist.html

News report on Sanna’s resignation:
http://www.nature.com/news/uncertainty-shrouds-psychologist-s-resignation-1.10968

Official report of Erasmus University’s investigation of Smeesters (longish but fascinating):
http://www.eur.nl/fileadmin/ASSETS/press/2012/Juli/report_Committee_for_inquiry_prof._Smeesters.publicversion.28_6_2012.pdf

Interview with Uri Simonsohn in Nature News:
www.nature.com/news/the-data-detective-1.10937

See you all Thursday at noon!