Department of Corrections

E very editor of every peer-reviewed, scientific journal has the same nightmare, and this past May it came true for the editors of Science, one of the world’s most prestigious publications. In brief, Science published a study in its December 12, 2014, issue by Michael LaCour, a political science graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University who served as the senior author.1 The paper described how attitudes toward the marriage of same-sex couples could be changed after brief, face-to-face conversations with individuals who had a personal stake in the issue. Coming on the heels of sweeping societal changes in marriage equality rights, these findings garnered wide media attention. The study’s credibility quickly began to unravel after 2 graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, David Broockman, now an assistant professor at Stanford, and Joshua Kalla, were unable to reproduce its findings. They contacted Professor Green, as well as Peter Aronow, a political scientist at Yale, regarding the paper’s irregularities. Green confronted LaCour, who admitted to falsely describing some of the details of his study. Green then contacted the editors at Science and asked them to retract the paper, even though Michael LaCour disagreed with that decision. Also involved in breaking this story was the editorial staff of the website Retraction Watch, which in recent years has played a major role in the retraction of a great many falsified articles. After further scrutiny, more problems emerged. Specifically, LaCour falsely claimed that cash payments were given to the subjects as incentives to participate in the survey. Moreover, he falsely credited several foundations or institutions with funding his work and made untruthful assertions about where or how he obtained his data set and even about the survey firm he supposedly used during the study. On May 20, 2015, the editors of Science published an online “editorial expression of concern.” This awful scenario next made its