Francesca Gino

Francesca Gino (born 1978 (age 45) ) is an Italian-American behavioral scientist.

In June 2023, after an investigation concluded that she had falsified data in her research, she was placed on unpaid administrative leave from her position as Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and as head of HBS's Negotiation, Organizations and Markets (NOM) unit. Gino was also later accused of plagiarism.

Education and early career
Gino grew up in Tione di Trento, Italy. She earned her Bachelor's degree at the University of Trento, Italy, in 2001, and her MSc and PhD degrees at Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa in 2004. During these studies, she came to Harvard Business School as a visiting fellow, and stayed on as a postdoctoral fellow after completing her doctorate.

Before joining Harvard University in 2010, she taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University.

Career
Gino conducted research on rule-breaking, which she discusses in her 2018 book, Rebel Talent. She was also affiliated with Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation, and with Harvard University's Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative. Between December 2016 and 2019, she served as editor-in-chief of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

Gino, the co-author of many peer-reviewed articles, was described by behavioral scientist Maurice Schweitzer at the Wharton School as a "leading scholar in the field" of behavioral science.

Allegations of data fabrication
In or before 2020, a graduate student named Zoé Ziani developed concerns about the validity of results from a highly publicized paper by Gino about networking. 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. In spring 2021, Ziani conducted a replication of Gino's study, failing to obtain any of the effects Gino had reported, and concluding "that there was almost no way the paper’s effect size could have been naturally generated" (as summarized by The New Yorker). Ziani, together with 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. Later that year, the Data Colada team contacted Harvard University about anomalies in four papers by Gino. 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.

In June 2023, after the internal investigation had resulted in a 1200-page report that found Gino "committed research misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly," and recommended the university initiate steps leading to her termination, Harvard Business School placed her on unpaid administrative leave. 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." 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. 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."

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."

The four now-retracted papers at the heart of the allegations are: The first of these papers had already been retracted due to an unrelated data issue involving Dan Ariely, 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. Gino denied having falsified data, and 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."

The lawsuit raised concerns about chilling effects. Open science proponent Simine Vazire raised over $370,000 to help cover the legal fees of Data Colada.

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" (according to The Harvard Crimson). 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.

As part of its motion to partially dismiss, Harvard submitted its internal 1200-page report as evidence. 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. 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." In the view of Vox journalist Kelsey Piper, the unsealed document "makes the allegations of Gino’s misconduct look more warranted than ever."

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" (The Chronicle of Higher Education) 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." 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. Behavioral scientist Juliana Schroeder of UC 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. Gino reacted by decrying the Many Co-Authors Project for 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.

Allegations of plagiarism
In April 2024, it was reported that Gino was suspected of numerous instances of plagiarism in several of her works, including her books Rebel Talent and Sidetracked, which were from a variety of sources, including several undergraduate theses (none of which were supervised by Gino), research papers and chapters by other researchers, and newspaper and magazine articles, including those by Forbes and Reactor magazine (formerly Tor.com). Gino's lawyer denied the allegations.