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Subject: Weekly Briefing: Star scholar accused of research fraud sues Harvard and three bloggers
Scholar’s lawsuit accuses Harvard, bloggers of defamation
Illustration by The Chronicle; image from TedXTrentoStudio, YouTube
Francesca Gino (above) filed a $25-million defamation suit this week against Harvard University and three scholars who accused her of fabricating research data.
Gino, a professor at Harvard’s business school, rose to prominence for her research on dishonesty in leadership and workplace behavior.
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Scholar’s lawsuit accuses Harvard, bloggers of defamation
Illustration by The Chronicle; image from TedXTrentoStudio, YouTube
Francesca Gino (above) filed a $25-million defamation suit this week against Harvard University and three scholars who accused her of fabricating research data.
Gino, a professor at Harvard’s business school, rose to prominence for her research on dishonesty in leadership and workplace behavior. In her lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in the U.S. district court in Massachusetts, Gino denies that she falsified data. She says Data Colada, a blog by three business-school professors who have written about her research, made erroneous accusations about her work. The lawsuit calls the statements on Data Colada “false and defamatory.”
As for Harvard, she accuses the institution of not producing substantial evidence that she committed research misconduct, and her suit calls the sanctions the institution placed against her, including unpaid leave, “unwarranted and excessive.”
Gino says she was placed on administrative leave on June 13, for two years. The leave bars her from campus and eliminates her teaching duties, research work, student mentorship, and titled professorship, according to her lawsuit. The lawsuit adds that the allegations have marked her career and delayed a book deal.
“I want to be very clear: I have never, ever falsified data or engaged in research misconduct of any kind,” Gino said in a statement on LinkedIn.
In June, The Chronicle reported that Gino was on administrative leave, after an investigation that Harvard had been conducting into her research. Data Colada then published a series of blog posts that they called “evidence of fraud” in four of her studies. The bloggers also wrote that they believed that these were not isolated incidents. They identified problems like original data sets that didn’t match published sets and problems with how the data was sorted.
It’s worth noting that two of Gino’s papers mentioned in the Data Colada posts have been retracted, and a third retraction is forthcoming. A fourth paper was retracted in 2021 because of a separate instance of data fabrication.
Gino’s lawsuit also takes issue with Harvard’s timing of its investigation. She first learned about the allegations in October 2021 from Harvard Business School’s research-integrity officer and that Harvard was investigating in April 2022, according to the lawsuit.
In her lawsuit, she accuses Harvard of not giving her enough time to review and respond to the draft findings. She said she was given three weeks to review the material when she was going on a two-week trip to Italy. Gino also said in her lawsuit that she wasn’t allowed to see the documentation from a forensics firm hired by Harvard. And on June 13 this year, the Harvard Business School dean told her that he would accept the panel’s conclusions, according to her lawsuit.
The lawsuit states that Harvard found Gino committed misconduct based on the institution’s “inconclusive” observation of discrepancies and “speculation.” The Harvard policy at the time said that the investigative committee needed to prove that she “‘intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly’ falsified or fabricated data” to prove research misconduct, according to the lawsuit.
A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by The Chronicle. The Data Colada authors also declined to comment, adding that they had not read the lawsuit as of Wednesday afternoon.
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