Fraud or apathy: What is academia’s biggest threat?
Diederik Stapel committed a truly massive fraud. And he wasn’t even very good at it. As we know now, he completely made up the data of many – and probably most – of his (very prominent) academic publications. I have written about him before , because obviously he forms both a fascinating and worrying case. It is worrying not because it makes me suspect there are probably more of such massive fraud cases that currently remain undetected – his fraud was so huge that I have trouble imagining – perhaps naively – that it is not unique. However, I have much less trouble imagining that for every case like Stapel’s, there are probably many more of much smaller fraud, which could easily add up to something even bigger. Stapel made up all his data regarding pretty much all his publications – and got away with it for a long time. How many people might there be out there who make up only parts of their data for some of their publications…? It is like cases of insider trading, or rogue investment ...