FLICKR, SHARON HALL SHIPP
Late last month, psychologist Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University Rotterdam resigned from his post after an investigative committee concluded that it had “no confidence in [his studies’] scientific integrity.” On June 25, ScienceInsider reported that the wrong-doing was first brought to the university’s attention by “an anonymous fraud hunter.” Three days later, the university identified Uri Simonsohn, a social psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, as the anonymous whistleblower. His technique: a statistical analysis that looks at the effect of removing extreme data, according to a blog post by Richard Gill of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who evaluated the technique.
Simonsohn also notified a US university about another psychology paper flagged by his method as possibly being fraudulent, and the ...
