Dutch Academe Faces Second Recent Case of Research Fraud

A marketing researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, resigned on Thursday after an investigation found problems with the “scientific integrity” of some of his work and the university sought the retraction of two papers, reports Science. It is the second recent case of fraud in Dutch academe involving social psychology. Last year Diederik A. Stapel, a social psychologist, was suspended from his post at Tilburg University because he had made up data for dozens of research papers—a discovery that has shaken up the field. Science said that it could not contact the Rotterdam researcher, Dirk Smeesters, but that according to the university, he had acknowledged “massaging” the data in some papers.