[From the article “The truth squad” by Erik Stokstad, published in Science]

“In August 2011, Diederik Stapel, a prominent psychologist and a dean at Tilburg University here, confessed to faking data for dozens of papers over 15 years. As part of an internal investigation, Marcel van Assen, a psychologist in the university’s Department of Methodology and Statistics, spent months looking into Stapel’s data, methods, and results. The scope of the fraud was staggering, but just as alarming as the fabricated data, Van Assen says, were the flawed analyses, rife with statistical problems, that Stapel had performed. The fact that all his papers had been approved by co-authors and published in respectable journals meant psychology had a larger problem, Van Assen says. “I thought, holy shit, this is not a characteristic just of Stapel or Tilburg.””

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