Everybody was shocked to hear of the firing of Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School. It's not called firing, it's called "revocation of tenure". Tenure grants academics the right to stay on for as long as they wish- there's no retirement, officially, although most academics do hang up their hats at some point.
This was the first instance of a tenured faculty being asked to leave at Harvard in about 80 years since the system of tenure was introduced to create conditions necessary for independent scholarship. Gino had to leave after HBS concluded that she had falsified data in several papers she had published.
The Economist has a story about a graduate student who seems to have similarly succumbed to the allurement of attaining stardom through publishing. An unpublished paper written by a high-flying graduate student has been withdrawn by MIT and the student's personal website taken down.
Empirical papers are especially prone to falsification because the potential for falsification is much greater than in theoretical research. The pressures to publish even at the graduate level are considerable:
More than in other disciplines, success depends on a few high-stakes events. Job-market candidates are evaluated on a single paper, rather than a body of work. Because institutional pedigree and advisers carry lots of weight, young researchers may face pressure to overstate results.
Tenure makes academics very attractive- and at least at business schools, the pay is pretty good at least some disciplines: accounting, finance, marketing. And tenure is contingent on publishing. The temptation to get in papers in through data manipulation is large.
Data manipulation is a different problem from plagiarism. There are reasonably effective tools to detect plagiarism today. But somebody playing around with a dataset has a greater chance of getting away with it.
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