Because the paper is suspected of using data fabricated by her husband in the study.
Ping Dong had her Ph.D. revoked by the university court, and her tenured tenure at Northwestern University was lost as a result.
Penalties for academic misconduct are usually limited to retraction or revocation of a degree, and there is little accountability for the benefits and benefits already earned by the degree. Ping Dong's loss of his teaching position also caused a discussion among the majority of netizens.
Ping Dong's Ph.D. graduation ceremony. Source: Its social media
The start was perfect
But.....
On June 28, 2017, Ping Dong posted a photo of herself at the University of Toronto's Ph.D. graduation ceremony on social media, and a month later, she went to teach at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and was offered a tenured assistant professorship.
However, only one year later, her doctoral dissertation was revoked as she was suspected of data fraud, and she lost her tenure at United States Northwestern University.
She reportedly had two papers retracted before the university court decided to revoke her degree and give her essay a failing grade. A summary of the case provided online by the school revealed that the retractions were more serious than the serious misconduct previously announced and were also under institutional investigation.
Ping Dong is a psychology researcher himself. According to the university's report, the study participants in her paper had an "impossibly high repetition rate" in their responses to open-ended questions. Ping Dong is accused of admitting to a former mentor that her husband had impersonated a participant in her study and that she had failed to properly randomize the results — though the mentor refuted that Dong had admitted this to her.
Based on the research of Ping Dong's PhD dissertation, she has published three papers that have been cited a total of 29 times according to Clarivate's Web of Science. According to court documents, two of the papers were retracted before the court made a decision due to data anomalies found by readers:
The manuscript has been withdrawn
According to court documents, the paper's problems began in May 2018 when Steve Lindsay, then-editor of Psychological Science, contacted Dong and her collaborator and mentor, Chen-Bo Zhong, after receiving a report from a reader about anomalous patterns in the data of Dong's article on darkness and fear of infection. Lindsay brought in a statistical consultant to evaluate the report at the time, and the consultant confirmed that there was a problem with the data, which he told Retraction Watch.
Dong also had a 2013 paper in Psychological Science that was not investigated. Lindsay said he probably thought Dong was an early-career researcher and therefore did not look for any other papers she had published in the journal.
When her supervisor, Zhong, confronted Dong about the questions in the Psychological Science paper, she blamed the problems on "inappropriate, but innocent randomization" in the data collection process — an explanation that the court concluded was "fake."
In early 2019, mentor Zhong provided a piece of testimony to the court that he had received an email in which Dong admitted to fabricating data. He said Aparna Labroo directed Dong's first-year thesis before leaving college in 2013, and that Labroo forwarded an email to himself in which Dong admitted that she had not properly randomized the data in the Psychological Science paper and that her husband had impersonated a participant.
However, Labroo refuted these claims in an email to Retraction Watch: "Ping Dong hasn't admitted anything like this to me, and I have never had or have such an email now. I had no idea that there was no randomization condition in her 2019 paper with her supervisor Zhong. ”
At no stage of the investigation did the University of Toronto contact me or ask me any questions about the matter, so any references to me in the report are pure rumors.
Zhong did not respond to a request for comment, but instead referred it to the university's media office. A spokesperson for the university confirmed the existence of such an email, but refused to release any of the documents presented at the court hearing.
"The reasons for the Tribunal's decision are self-evident. The university was unable to provide further information. ”
At the same time, the university said that the student falsified the data for her Ph.D. and also used the falsified data to publish a thesis with a university professor, which seriously threatened the integrity of the university, and that retracting the Ph.D. dissertation was one of the most severe penalties that could be done, and that if the misconduct was discovered before she graduated, she would not have received a degree at all.
Profits from paper fraud
Should there be accountability?
This time Ping Dong's incident was revoked because of the revocation of the teaching position. It also caused many netizens to think, as if the matter of accountability for the benefits obtained from paper fraud still occurs relatively rarely in the academic world.
For example, by buying papers, many scholars have gained great benefits. Some have even become highly cited scholars, such as the Spain chemist Raphael · Luc. He already has about 700 SCI papers in the so-called field of green chemistry, with an average of one paper published every 37 hours.
He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher in the field of chemistry by Clarivate Analytics for 5 consecutive years. According to Google Scholar, Professor Luke has been cited more than 40,000 times so far.
The number of times Luke's article has been cited
It has been reported that United Kingdom engineer Nick · Wise was engaged in academic fraud in his spare time and discovered a "paper factory" that privately sold paper signatures, and Professor Luke was involved. For example, a paper on the degradation of ibuprofen in wastewater was published by Professor Luke with six collaborators from Bushehr University and Tabriz University in Iran.
But in an interview, Professor Luke said he did not know all the Iran co-authors listed in the study, which, if true, meant someone had bought his paper.
Although the school finally decided to suspend Luke from his job without pay for 13 years, as a scientist with more than 700 SCI papers, Luke was not alarmed, after all, the attraction of a highly cited scientist to the school is infinite. To this day, many institutions around the world are still looking to hire scientists like Luke to improve their international rankings.
Luke even said in an interview: If it weren't for me, the school would have dropped 300 places in the rankings!
And this is also the confidence given to him by the paper.
In this regard, many scholars believe that paper fraud involves academic misconduct and academic dishonesty, which is intolerable in the academic community. If the counterfeiter obtains benefits through fraud, such as obtaining degrees, professional titles, honors, funds, etc., these are improper benefits and should be recovered and revoked in order to maintain academic order and social justice.
But in reality, many of the penalties only stop at retraction, as in the case of the article, which is more attractive than the academic misconduct that a scholar may be involved in, and which can directly raise the school's ranking by 300 places.