A student, Robert, showed his faculty advisor a graph of his results which indicated a difference between two conditions. Although the effect was small, it supported a theory that the advisor had long been advocating and seemed important. Robert and the advisor quickly submitted a short communication for publication in a relevant professional journal. Soon thereafter, the student took a leave of absence. The advisor decided that the project was too important to wait for Robert's return and so he asked a second student, Marie, to take over. Marie began by reviewing Robert's data and discovered that some data points seemed to have been discarded. Furthermore, there were discrepancies between some of the data points in Robert's notebook and those used in his statistical analysis. When Marie analyzed all of the data in the notebook, the original difference disappeared. Marie reported this to her advisor. What should the advisor do?
The advisor sent an email message to Robert and informed him that he believed that falsification had occurred. He also wrote to the editor of the journal to which the short communication had been sent and withdrew the manuscript. Robert emailed back indicating that he was resigning from the advisor's research group and had made arrangements to join another group when he returned from his leave of absence.
The advisor thought better of his quick decision, tore up the letter to
the editor and tried to find Robert. After several weeks he was able to
contact Robert (who was recovering from surgery). Robert acknowledged
the advisor's concern and explained the discrepancies. Robert had used a
statistical test to drop a few data points that were quite far from the
mean, and had used a well-accepted weighting factor in transforming the
raw data that appeared in his notebook. He apologized for not having
made all of this clear in his write-up.
Discussion:
Analyze this situation using the guidelines proposed by Bebeau. Be sure
to include in your analysis answers to the following questions: