Harvard University honesty researcher Francesca Gino, whose work has come under fire for suspected data falsification, may also have plagiarized passages in some of her high-profile publications.
A book chapter co-authored by Gino, who was found by a 2023 Harvard Business School (HBS) investigation to have committed research misconduct, contains numerous passages of text with striking similarities to 10 earlier sources. The sources include published papers and student theses, according to an analysis shared with Science by University of Montreal psychologist Erinn Acland.
Science has confirmed Acland’s findings and identified at least 15 additional passages of borrowed text in Gino’s two books, Rebel Talent: Why it Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan. Some passages duplicate text from news reports or blogs. Others contain phrasing identical to passages from academic literature. The extent of duplication varies between passages, but all contain multiple identical phrases, as well as clear paraphrases and significant structural similarity.
Gino is “steadfast in her commitment to uncovering the truth in each instance, responding decisively and correcting the record if necessary,” her lawyer, Andrew Miltenberg, said in a statement. “It is wildly unfair and prejudicial to litigate these accusations in the volatile domain of public opinion. History has shown the peril of premature judgment, particularly within the scientific community, where reputations can be irreparably tarnished.” The HBS investigation recommended the university begin the process of terminating Gino’s employment, and her institutional profile has stated since June 2023 that she is on administrative leave.
Debora Weber-Wulff, a plagiarism expert at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences, says Science’s findings are “quite serious” and warrant further investigation by the publishers and universities. HBS and Harvard Business Review Press, which published Sidetracked, declined to comment. Dey Street Books, a HarperCollins imprint that published Rebel Talent, and Guilford Press, publisher of the edited book The Social Psychology of Good and Evil that includes the co-authored chapter, did not respond to a request for comment.
Acland says she decided to “poke around” into Gino’s work in September 2023, after the researcher filed a $25 million lawsuit against HBS and the data sleuths who uncovered the misconduct. Acland focused on plagiarism, rather than data issues, because of her experience detecting it in student work. She searched phrases from Gino’s work on Google Scholar to see whether they matched content from other works.
She says she found apparent plagiarism in the very first sentence of the first work she assessed, the 2016 chapter “Dishonesty explained: What leads moral people to act immorally.” The sentence—“The accounting scandals and the collapse of billion-dollar companies at the beginning of the 21st century have forever changed the business landscape”—is word for word the same as a passage in a 2010 paper by the University of Washington management researcher Elizabeth Umphress and colleagues.
Other sections of text in the chapter match six further published papers and chapters, and three student theses. Some matches are exact and others include paraphrased words or phrases but retain clear similarities.
None of the student theses were supervised by Gino, but one was supervised by Gino’s co-author on the chapter, Duke University behavioral scientist Dan Ariely. Ariely’s own work has come under scrutiny after evidence emerged of data falsification in his contribution to a now-retracted 2012 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A spokesperson for Ariely says he did not contribute to the writing of the chapter but only provided direction and feedback. No other authors or contributors are acknowledged.
The source used most extensively appears to be an undergraduate student thesis by Jasper Beijneveld, archived online in 2014 by Tilburg University (see graphic, below). Science investigated the possibility that Beijneveld and Gino both copied from a third source. But plagiarism detection software iThenticate detected no other significant matches in his thesis. Moreover, drafts of the thesis provided by Beijneveld’s thesis adviser Anna van ‘t Veer, an academic integrity and methodology researcher at Leiden University, show the passages in question evolved over time, with corrections and other changes being incorporated into later versions. The first draft differed substantively from the published version that matches Gino’s work, suggesting there was no third source.
Some of the matching material includes phrases Van ‘t Veer had contributed. She says this misappropriation of her and Beijneveld’s work “distorts the scientific record.” Beijneveld, now working in human resources, wrote in an email to Science that if someone had used passages from his thesis without proper referencing, he would be shocked.
For students, the opportunity to be cited by eminent researchers—or even be invited to co-author work if their contribution is extensive—is invaluable, Acland says. “In these cases, they didn’t even get a citation for their work.”
After receiving Acland’s analysis, Science used iThenticate to identify possibly plagiarized sources in Rebel Talent and Sidetracked, then manually analyzed the text. Some full sentences leapt out as directly matching existing sources: For instance, a sentence describing Toy Story 2 in Rebel Talent—published in 2018—is a perfect match for a sentence from a 2017 story in Reactor Magazine.
More commonly, iThenticate pointed to passages, often several paragraphs long, in which some words and phrases matched existing texts whereas others were
reworded—so-called “mosaic plagiarism.” For instance, a description of walking through Milan’s fashion district in Rebel Talent discusses the “imposing houses with high, ivy-covered walls, lattice doors, miniature fountains, and beautiful courtyards.” The seeming source, a 2014 travel magazine article, describes “imposing houses with beautiful courtyards, simple on the outside, but flowery inside. To poke around this neighborhood is to discover high ivy-covered walls, lattice doors, miniature fountains and stony soils.”
Both of Gino’s books and Gino and Ariely’s chapter contain an extensive list of references. However, for most of the examples of apparent plagiarism detected by Science, the original text was not cited.
Acland and Science also found earlier versions of Gino and Ariely’s 2016 chapter archived online. These drafts include wording that matches the apparently plagiarized sources even more closely than the final version of the chapter. Thomas Lancaster, an academic integrity researcher at Imperial College London, says there is a “very clear progression” visible in these texts: The source text appears in the draft works with few changes, followed by more paraphrasing in the final chapter. The similarities are “a lot more than you would ever get purely by chance,” he says.
Adam Galinsky, a social psychologist at Columbia Business School who is listed as a co-author on one of the drafts, says he was unaware that the draft existed and that Gino—as first author, writing in her core subject area—must have written it. A source close to Gino says researchers use such drafts to jot down ideas and theories to later iterate on, and that it is unfair to “draw parallels” between a draft and other sources.
Stanford University psychologist Benoît Monin, whose 2007 and 2009 work appears to be extensively used in the Gino and Ariely chapter, says he “cannot offer an obvious innocuous explanation for the striking similarities” between his writing and the chapter text, but that he does not feel able to competently comment on whether the similarities meet the definition of plagiarism.
That definition can be tricky, Weber-Wulff says, but using others’ work in a way that disguises its source is a misrepresentation of where the ideas come from and what the author’s contribution is, which prevents other researchers from scrutinizing and follow the reasoning. “You should always, if you’re using text from someone else, say where it begins, where it ends, and where you got it from. I don’t think that’s rocket science.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/embattled-harvard-honesty-professor-accused-plagiarism
