This paper has been cited more than 6k times. It's fatally flawed.

Re:This paper has been cited more than 6k times. It's fatall... by oawiejrlij on Sunday January 25, 2026 @12:49PM (#46756271)

When I was a grad student I contacted a journal to tell them my PI had falsified their data. The journal never responded. I also contacted my university's legal department. They invited me in for an hour, said they would talk to me again soon, and never spoke to me or responded to my calls again after that. This was in a Top-10-in-the-USA CS program. I have close to zero trust in academia. This is why we have a "reproducibility crisis".

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Re:This paper has been cited more than 6k times. It's fatall... by neilv on Sunday January 25, 2026 @03:08PM (#46757661)

PSA for any grad student in this situation: get a lawyer, ASAP, to protect your own career.

Universities care about money and reputation. Individuals at universities care about their careers.

With exceptions of some saintly individual faculty members, a university is like a big for-profit corporation, only with less accountability.

Faculty bring in money, are strongly linked to reputation (scandal news articles may even say the university name in headlines rather than the person's name), and faculty are hard to get rid of.

Students are completely disposable, there will always be undamaged replacements standing by, and turnover means that soon hardly anyone at the university will even have heard of the student or internal scandal.

Unless you're really lucky, the university's position will be to suppress the messenger.

But if you go in with a lawyer, the lawyer may help your whistleblowing to be taken more seriously, and may also help you negotiate a deal to save your career. (For example of help, you need the university's/department's help in switching advisors gracefully, with funding, even as the uni/dept is trying to minimize the number of people who know about the scandal.)

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Re:This paper has been cited more than 6k times. It's fatall... by lancewiggs on Sunday January 25, 2026 @08:32PM (#46760691)

I found mistakes in the spreadsheet backing up 2 published articles (corporate governance). The (tenured Ivy) professor responded by paying me (after I’d graduated) to write a comprehensive working paper that relied on a fixed spreadsheet and rebutted the articles.

Integrity is hard, but reputations are lifelong.

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Re:This paper has been cited more than 6k times. It's fatall... by lotsofpulp on Monday January 26, 2026 @09:22AM (#46765961)

>PSA for any grad student in this situation: get a lawyer, ASAP, to protect your own career.

Back in my day, grad students generally couldn't afford lawyers.

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Re:This paper has been cited more than 6k times. It's fatall... by bflesch on Sunday January 25, 2026 @02:19PM (#46757229)

Name and shame these frauds. Let me guess, was it Stanford?

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Re:This paper has been cited more than 6k times. It's fatall... by sizzle on Monday January 26, 2026 @12:01AM (#46762057)

Name and shame?

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