An interview with Uri Simonsohn, the data sleuth behind the Smeesters psychology misconduct case

Last week, I wrote about the case of Dirk Smeesters, a social psychologist who had resigned from Erasmus University Rotterdam after an investigation uncovered problems with the data in two of his papers. His case follows the scandal of Diederik Stapel, another psychologist from a Dutch University who was found guilty of research fraud last year. As I noted in my post, the Smeesters case is unique. While earlier cases of fraud in psychology, including Stapel Karen Ruggiero and Marc Hauser, were uncovered by internal whistleblowers using inside information, Smeesters was found out by an external source using statistical sleuthing. At the time of writing, that source was anonymous but on Thursday, he was revealed to be Uri Simonsohn, another social psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve now interviewed Simonsohn for Nature News, about how he started his investigation, his motives, the fallout, and more. Go and read that ...