Data fabrication accusation and investigation
In or before 2020,graduate student ZoéZiani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about personal networking. [16] According to Ziani,she was strongly warned by her academic advisers not to criticize Gino,and two members of her dissertation committee refused to approve her thesis unless she deleted criticism of Gino's paper from it. [16] In spring 2021,Ziani conducted a replication of Gino's study,failing to obtain any of the effects Gino had reported,and concluded "that there was almost no way the paper’s effect size could have been naturally generated" (as summarized by The New Yorker). [16]
Ziani and a collaborator subsequently alerted Data Colada,a team of three behavioral scientists known for investigating faulty research,who had been independently developing concerns about Gino's work since 2014. [16] Later that year,the Data Colada team contacted Harvard University about anomalies in four papers by Gino. [16] [17] Harvard subsequently conducted its own internal investigation with the help of an outside firm,which discovered additional data alterations besides the cases raised by Data Colada. [16]
An internal investigation resulted in a 1,200-page report that found Gino,a tenured professor,"committed research misconduct intentionally,knowingly,or recklessly" and recommended the university initiate steps leading to her termination. In June 2023,Harvard Business School placed her on unpaid administrative leave. [3] [4] [16] [18] [19] As described by the dean of HBS,"[a]fter a comprehensive evaluation that took 18 months from start to completion,the investigation committee—comprising three senior HBS colleagues—determined that research misconduct had occurred." [20] According to the report,Gino offered two explanations for the signs of data tampering:either that this was an honest mistake by her or her research assistants,or that "someone who had access to her computer,online data-storage account,and/or data files" tampered with her data out of malice,naming one of her coauthors in one of the since-retracted papers as the most likely suspect. [21] Neither of the two explanations was accepted by Harvard's investigators,who wrote in the report that "Although we acknowledge that the theory of a malicious actor might be remotely possible,we do not find it plausible," adding that Gino’s "repeated and strenuous argument for a scenario of data falsification by bad actors across four different studies,an argument we find to be highly implausible,leads us to doubt the credibility of her written and oral statements to this committee more generally." [19]
Around the same time as Harvard placed her on leave,Data Colada published four blog posts detailing evidence that the four papers (all of which had been retracted or set to be retracted at that point),and possibly others by Gino,"contain fake data." [4] [22]
The four now-retracted papers at the heart of the allegations:
The first of these papers had already been retracted due to an unrelated data issue, also uncovered by Data Colada. The other three papers were retracted in response to Harvard's investigation.
Defamation lawsuit
Gino subsequently filed a defamation suit against Harvard, Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar, and the three data investigators of Data Colada for $25 million, alleging that they had conspired to damage her reputation with false accusations and that the penalties against her amounted to gender-based discrimination under Title IX. [4] Gino denied having falsified data, and she accused Harvard and the Data Colada team of having "worked together to destroy my career and reputation despite admitting they have no evidence proving their allegations." [17]
The lawsuit raised concerns about chilling effects. A group of researchers, including open science proponent Simine Vazire, raised over $370,000 to help cover the legal fees of Data Colada. [23] [24]
On October 10, 2023, Harvard University and Dean Datar filed a motion to partially dismiss the lawsuit, "citing the need for the University to have autonomy in its academic decision-making". [25] On November 8, 2023, the Data Colada defendants filed a motion to dismiss the claims against them, contending that Gino's lawsuit does not meet the pleading standards for a viable defamation action. [26]
As part of its motion to partially dismiss, Harvard submitted its internal 1200-page report as evidence. [21] [27] Initially it was kept under seal, but the university as well as The New Yorker and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press filed motions to make it public, which were opposed by Francesca Gino's lawyers, who filed a motion to keep the report from the public. [28] In March 2024, Judge Myong J. Joun ruled to unseal it (with some redactions) as a judicial record "to which there exists a presumptive right of public access." [21] In the view of Vox journalist Kelsey Piper, the unsealed document "makes the allegations of Gino’s misconduct look more warranted than ever." [29]
On September 11, 2024, the judge dismissed all of Gino's claims against the Data Colada defendants (defamation and other claims), and dismissed Gino's defamation and certain other claims (such as violation of privacy) against the Harvard University defendants, while allowing some breach of contract claims against Harvard to continue. [30] [27] Gino also claimed that Harvard discriminated against her on the basis of her gender. Harvard did not move for dismissal of that claim, so the litigation continued on that claim as well. [31]
In May 2025, Gino's tenure and employment at Harvard were terminated before the end of her two-year suspension in June 2025. The school declined to provide specific reasoning for their decision but did state that this kind of revocation of tenure is rare and had not occurred for decades. [32]
Many Co-Authors Project
Following the revelations by Harvard and Data Colada, the Many Co-Authors Project was launched by a group of Gino's co-authors, a "mass self-auditing effort" where over 140 collaborators of Francesca Gino are trying "to collect and share information on the provenance and availability of the data for all articles co-authored by Francesca Gino." [33] [34] [20] It began publishing findings on November 6, 2023, listing 56 papers that had named Gino as having been involved in data collection, and reporting that for around 60% of these, all the co-authors who had responded reported not having access to the raw data. [33] Behavioral scientist Juliana Schroeder of University of California Berkeley stated that she and other collaborators had initiated the retraction of another paper they had coauthored with Gino, citing a failure to track down data for four experiments in the paper and "unexplained issues" with two of its other datasets. [33] Gino reacted by decrying the Many Co-Authors Project for what she alleged was unfairly singling her out for scrutiny, and by accusing one of the involved researchers of falsely claiming that she (Gino) had collected data for one of the papers. [33]
