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Posts uit december, 2015 tonen

Stepping in as Reviewers

Some years ago, when I served on the Academic Integrity Committee investigating allegations of fraud against Dirk Smeesters, it fell upon me to examine Word documents of some of his manuscripts (the few that were not “lost”). The “track changes” feature afforded me a glimpse of earlier versions of the manuscripts as well as of comments made by Smeesters and his co-authors. One thing that became immediately obvious was that while all authors had contributed to the introduction and discussion sections, Smeesters alone had pasted in the results sections. Sometimes, the results elicited comments from his co-authors: “Oh, I didn’t know we also collected these measures” to which Smeesters replied something like “Yeah, that’s what I routinely do.” Another comment I vividly remember is: “Wow, these results look even better than we expected. We’re smarter than we thought!” More than a little ironic in retrospect. On the one hand I found these discoveries reassuring. I had spent many hours