LET’S SEE WHERE THIS GOES: A Scandal in Political Science.

A UCLA graduate student, Michael LaCour, appears to have faked a data set that was the basis for an article that he published in the highly prestigious journal Science. I have examined a second paper by LaCour. As I’ll explain, I’m convinced that it also is the product of faked results. . . . I do not believe he actually wrote the code that would be necessary to execute his method and, accordingly, I don’t believe that he really computed the estimates that he reports from his method. I do not have proof of my beliefs, only strong evidence. Proof would be simple—we ask LaCour to provide the code he wrote as well as the output from his computer. But until we see that proof—or LaCour’s refusal to provide such proof—I am willing to speculate.

Read the post for the full argument.

I . . . believe that there are lots of similar, yet so far undetected, cases like LaCour’s in political science. Over the past five or ten years I have noticed more and more papers written by young political scientists (grad students and assistant professors) that claim to use extremely fancy and complex statistical techniques, yet the authors do not seem to fully understand the techniques that they claim to use. Their descriptions of their statistical methods are often as opaque as the LaCour appendix that I discuss above. I won’t be surprised if, because of LaCour, journal editors and other researchers begin to request computer code and output of such papers. I won’t be surprised if we find a few more cases where the results have been completely fabricated. My hunch is that within political science there are about a half dozen additional Michael LaCours—researchers who are perceived to be solid and talented scholars yet have built that perception partly upon faked results.

Good luck with that. Earlier: Author retracts study of changing minds on same-sex marriage after colleague admits data were faked.