Malte Elson, a psychologist at the University of Bern, is hoping to chip away at some of the seemingly widespread problem of incorrect or falsified research that is plaguing academia.
When I build my research on top of something that’s erroneous and I don’t know about it,” he told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “that’s a cost because my research is built on false assumptions.”
That’s why Elson is leading a new initiative called ERROR. Starting with a philanthropic grant of $285,000, the project will compensate scholars each time they discover erroneous research. Some of these findings will be minor errors in citations or glitches in software, but others may be downright fraudulent. Scholars can propose papers they want to review, but the authors have to agree — in part because they have to be willing to give the ERROR researchers access to their original data.
The ERROR project workers are joining a growing cadre of other scholars who are investigating the work of colleagues. A blog called Data Colada, run by Joe Simmons of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Leif Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley, and Uri Simonsohn of the Esade Business School in Barcelona, has been outing fraudulent research since 2013.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Washington Examiner
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James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of No Way to Treat a Child.
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