And in an academic web of peer research, hundreds of published articles cite and work off of Hauser’s research.
Hauser has made a name for himself by executing novel research techniques in the field of animal cognition. His work with primates and cotton-top tamarins—the subject of Hauser’s only article to have been retracted—has involved a unique set of research skills and costly access to the animals.
“You don’t want to throw out about two decades of groundbreaking work, but you also don’t want to build a science on shaky ground,” said the psychology professor.
“How do we rescue millions of dollars of research?” the individual added.
LESSONS FROM THE PAST
As the community awaits the conclusions of the ORI investigation, the Psychology Department has turned to past precedence.
The department has circulated among its members an academic article about the case of Eric T. Poehlman, a former professor at the University of Vermont who was found responsible for research misconduct by an internal investigation in September of 2003.
The article, titled “Research Misconduct, Retraction, and Cleansing the Medical Literature: Lessons from the Poehlman Case,” recounts the process that UVM faculty members went through to identify tainted articles and inform the scientific community after Poehlman had been found responsible of misconduct.
“Our goal is to try to incrementally improve the record, to try to make it a little clearer,” said UVM Psychology Professor Russell P. Tracy, who has led the review since it began in 2005. The project is in its final phase, as members notify journals of their findings.
Instead of directly reviewing each published article, the committee asked co-authors of Poehlman’s published works to vouch for the validity of the pieces. Not all articles received a co-author’s stamp of approval, but Tracy said that the review found very few articles that could be considered fraudulent because of their reliance on the research in question.
“Secondarily fraudulent,” Tracy said.
After five years, Tracy has found little glory in his work, he said: “It’s a large arduous operation that takes faculty away from everything else that they have to do.”
But the academic article, which points to Tracy’s work as a model method, places the heavy responsibility of correcting the literature on the scientific community, demanding that it “treat every article as suspect until proven otherwise.”
“The ORI has neither the mandate nor the resources to lead the task of correcting a scientific literature polluted by fraudulent research,” the authors state. “This responsibility lies with the community of scientists.”
—Staff writer Noah S. Rayman can be reached at nrayman@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Elyssa A.L. Spitzer can be reached at spitzer@fas.harvard.edu.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
CORRECTION: September 21, 2010
Due to an editing error, the online headline for this Sept. 17 news article originally stated that the Psychology Department is reviewing Marc Hauser's works. According to Chair Susan E. Carey '64, the department does not anticipate engaging in any such review. It is in the early stages of trying to reach consensus about what the department's responsibilities are, if any, concerning efforts to evaluate Hauser's works.