What happened when one person tried to expose a treatise fraud?



In 2021, Associate Professor Joe Hilgard of

Illinois State University reports on his protests against treatise fraud and the consequences.

Crystal Prison Zone: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
https://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-tried-to-report-scientific-misconduct.html

Journal retracts two papers linking exposure to violence to aggressive behavior – Retraction Watch
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/12/06/journal-retracts-two-papers-linking-exposure-to-violence-to-aggressive-behavior/

In early 2018, Hilgard questioned and independently reviewed the treatise 'The priming effect of violent games on adolescent aggression ' written by Chien Chang and others at the Southwestern University School of Education in China. The we. Mr. Hilgard noticed that the numerical values of the results of the analysis of variance described in the treatise had no meaning, and reported to Mr. Chan, the lead author of the treatise. After receiving a reply from Mr. Chan to 'correct', the treatise will be revised in May 2018, but Mr. Hilgard continues to read the treatise, and statistically impossible numerical values appear as data. , I notice that there are some other mysteries.

'Mr. Chan's treatises often show mysterious statistical data,' said Hilgard, pointing out that similar mysterious statistical data can be found in articles written by Mr. Chan in the past. Hilgard announced in 2013, 'The priming effect of aggressive words and violent movies ' and 'The effect of media violence on adolescent aggressive attitudes ', announced by Chan in 2013. A table was extracted from the three papers ' Violence and Potential Aggression in Adolescent Movies ' and compared, even though the sample data used in each paper had a completely different population. The numbers given were surprisingly similar. Hilgard thinks, 'Even if you repeat the exact same experiment twice, it is unlikely that you will get such similar numbers,' and Chan wonders if he is reusing the data in the treatise.



While Mr. Hilgard is investigating several treatises, Mr. Chan publishes errata for past treatises one after another, but the correction adds an integer to the F value so that the data is statistically advantageous. It was said that some of them had doubts about their authenticity, such as just doing it. The important thing is that these corrections will affect the statistical data of Mr. Chan's other treatises, but Mr. Hilgard said, 'I think we should just make corrections so that the significance level of the statistical data and the F value match. '.



Mr. Chan continues to write new treatises, but Mr. Hilgard, who was concerned about the impact of the amount of data in the rough treatise for the huge amount, requested Mr. Chan for raw data. But Chan refuses, saying, 'Only the research team can see the data.' When Hilgard asked some Americans who co-authored Chan's treatise, 'Did you see the raw data in the treatise?', Even the co-authors said they didn't. Mr. Hilgard suggested to the co-authors that he should request the data from Mr. Chan, but he said that he was rejected by Mr. Chan as a result of the actual request, and Mr. Hilgard said that he did not think it was strange. When asked, he answered, 'Because it is China.'

Mr. Hilgard has determined that Mr. Chan's research is suspected of research misconduct and will report it to the chairman of the Southwestern University Academic Committee in May 2019. A month later, Mr. Hilgard received an email from Mr. Chan, but Mr. Hilgard was surprised to see that the raw statistical data was included. As a result of analysis based on raw data, Mr. Hilgard calculates results that are completely different from the data released by Mr. Chan et al. The image on the left is the result of Mr. Hilgard and the image on the right is the result of Mr. Chan. 'There is no correlation between the data calculated by Mr. Chan, and it has a strange box shape that is not found in general normal distributions and lognormal distributions,' Hilgard said.




Mr. Hilgard will report to Southwestern University again based on this result, but the response from Southwestern University is that 'Mr. Chan lacks knowledge of statistics and research methods, but the data is incorrect. There is not enough evidence to do that. ' Although he admitted that there was a discrepancy in the research procedure and data, he said that he did not comment on the most suspicious data reuse as evidence of research misconduct or the fact that the raw data contained statistically impossible numerical values. Four months after asking the chairman for further answers, Hilgard received a reply from two experts that the chairman consulted, 'This is an academic conflict issue.' However, even though he asked the expert for a detailed report, he said that he had not yet received a reply as of January 2021.

Having decided that the research institute would not make any corrections, Mr. Hilgard will approach the journal to stop publishing the article. Some institutions, such as Youth and Society, quickly withdraw the article, but without mentioning the institutions that do not compete at all or the authenticity of the essential raw data, 'What was described as an experiment is not an experiment. There was also an institution that made the correction as '.' 'I think there is a difference in handling due to the power relationship between editors and publishers and the inexperience of editors,' said Hilgard.

Not only Hilgard, but also psychologist James Benjamin and University of Melbourne Simin Vasir have raised this series of issues on social media.







In February 2020, the Chinese government announced that it would ban the payment of cash fees for publications . As a result, the conventional practice of allocating funds and ranking using the number of published papers and cited references as the main index will be abolished, and the system will be changed to a system in which evaluation is based on the quality of papers. It is expected. Also, in January 2021, a prominent researcher belonging to the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the highest research institute in the technical field in China, was investigated on suspicion of research misconduct, and the values of papers in China changed. It is thought that it will go.

'We need to understand that there are some people in the field of science who are doing fraudulent or very wrong research, and that defective research data can also be used for policy and meta-analysis. 'There is,' he concludes, 'it's very easy to generate unreliable treatises, but it's very difficult and rewarding to withdraw these treatises.'

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