Tilburg
University in the E.U. is known to have an emphasis on empirical studies in the
social sciences (including business). With this bent, the university is
typically considered to be closer to the American academic tradition than that
of Europa. So when Dr. Diederik Stapel, a psychology professor at Tilburg,
acknowledged to having committed academic fraud in several dozen published
articles in academic journals, the academic status of empirical research itself
was thrown into question. Experts point out that Stapel “took advantage of a
system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to
find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.” Indeed, it
is rare even for peer-reviewers of potential articles to demand to see the raw
empirical data supporting a given study’s conclusions. According to Dr. Jelte
Wicherts, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, the problem of
data being misused by the scholars who collect and analyze it is widespread in
the discipline of psychology.
The full essay is at "Empirical Social Science."
