This is quite a story on several levels. The two main characters in this story are both criminology professors. Professor Eric Stewart taught at Florida State University and Professor Justin Pickett taught at the University of Albany. Stewart is black and Pickett is white and unfortunately that does become important in this story later. In 2011 the two professors collaborated on a paper designed to study the public’s view of sentencing Black and Hispanic convicts.

The study tested if the public’s prejudicial views impacted their desire for harsher sentences for black and hispanic Americans. The published findings were that as black and hispanic populations grew, so did the public’s want for more discriminatory sentences.

In short, the study found that people were pretty racist toward minorities facing prison sentences. And for eight years the study went unquestioned. But then someone questioned some of the findings in that 2011 study and co-author Justin Pickett began to look it over more closely. What he found was some pretty obvious evidence of fraud. In July 2019, Pickett requested that the entire paper be retracted: (Note I’m quoting a bit of his explanation but it’s not difficult to follow. Just keep your eyes on Dr. Stewart.)

On May 5, 2019, my coauthors and I received an email that identified data irregularities in our study, Johnson, Stewart, Pickett, and Gertz (2011), and in four other articles by my coauthors. I asked my coauthors to send me the full data for Johnson et al. (2011), but encountered difficulties getting them. Consequently, I examined the limited files I already had, and discovered 500 unique respondents and 500 duplicates, as well as several other problems, like inexplicable changes in sample size from manuscript draft (N = 868) to published article (N = 1,184) that did not affect means, standard deviations, or regression coefficients. I sent an email to my coauthors on June 6 that listed these issues and provided my files (see Appendix A). One of my coauthors, Dr. Gertz, then contacted the former director of the Research Network, who confirmed that the survey he ran for us included only 500 respondents. At that point, Dr. Stewart sent me a copy of the data for our article (N = 500).

In the article, we claim to have 1,184 respondents nested in 91 counties. In the actual data, there are only 500 respondents, and they are nested in 326 counties. Dr. Stewart acknowledged that both the sample size and county number reported in the article were wrong. He said the explanations for the differences were that: 1) he accidently doubled the sample, and 2) he created 91 “county clusters” for the analysis by grouping together the 326 counties. The published article never mentions county clusters, or grouping together counties. It is also unclear how the sample of 500 grew to 1,184 in our article, and then to 1,379 in Dr. Stewart’s later Social Problems article (Stewart et al., 2015), which uses the same data (with the same 54.8% response rate, and same $62,700 mean family income). Duplicating the 500 respondents, as Dr. Stewart said he did, would lead to a sample size of only 1,000.

Dr. Stewart now says there were two surveys conducted for our study, one with 500 respondents and one with 425, and that the results for the combined sample (N = 925) are similar to those in the published article. However, I am uncomfortable with the new results for four reasons. First, I have not seen them. Dr. Stewart has not sent me the data for the second sample, and although he has sent Stata output for the combined sample to the lead author, Dr. Johnson, he has asked him not to share it. Second, the published article reports 1,184 respondents, not 925. Third, our published article lists only one survey company—the Research Network—and one survey. Fourth, Dr. Stewart has refused to tell me who conducted the second survey, and Dr. Johnson has said he does not know who conducted it. This lack of transparency and accountability is why I have decided not to wait for my coauthors to finish their reanalysis before asking for a retraction.

All of this should sound pretty suspicious. If there’s another data set, why didn’t Dr. Stewart ever mention it to his co-author? Why isn’t it mentioned in the paper? Why don’t the number of respondents add up even with the addition of a 2nd survey group to the first? And why won’t Dr. Stewart tell anyone who performed the 2nd survey? (On that last question he did eventually offer two different answers.)

But the really interesting part comes next. Dr. Pickett took the original survey data and reanalyzed it. In other words, what results would the study have reached if you only used the verifiably data? You’ve probably guessed by now what he found:

There is only one possible conclusion from reanalyzing the data I have: the sample was not just duplicated in the analysis for the published article; the data were also altered, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and those alterations produced the article’s main findings.

All of this is obviously bad and ultimately this article and four other articles which Dr. Stewart had worked on were retracted because of questions about the data. And even then, Stewart’s university decided there was nothing to see here.

This study, along with four more written by Stewart, ranging from 2006 to 2015, were retracted amidst this debate – leading to FSU finally agreeing to a small-scale inquiry. Made up of a three-person committee, the inquiry’s purpose was to decide if an investigation was necessary…

During this process, Stewart told school administrators that Pickett’s claims “essentially lynched me and my academic character” – taking on greater weight considering 5 out of his 6 retracted studies are race-related, and Stewart himself is black.

The committee stated they did not find enough evidence for fraud nor to move forward with an investigation, seemingly ending the dispute.

In March of 2020, Dr. Pickett wrote a much longer analysis of the five retracted papers, noting that Dr. Stewart was in charge of keeping the data for all five of them. But perhaps more significantly, Stewart’s co-authors on these papers were all very high profile people in the criminology community.

The coauthors of the five retracted articles include two past editors of Criminology, the flagship journal of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), as well as three ASC Fellows and two ASC vice presidents…

To my knowledge, none of the coauthors have spoken publicly about what happened in the retracted articles, except to insist in the retraction notices that the irregularities resulted from “coding mistakes” and “transcription errors” (Law & Society Review 2020; Criminology 2020a; b), and to defend the accuracy of the retracted findings (Law & Society Review 2020).

Dr. Pickett then spends several pages highlighting the close relationships between Dr. Stewart and the co-authors defending his errors. I won’t excerpt it here but it’s interesting reading. But a few months later, in June of 2020, there was a new allegation made about a 6th paper co-authored by Dr. Stewart.

Stewart is now having another paper retracted, this one from 2003 in Justice Quarterly. The paper, titled “School social bonds, school climate, and school misbehavior: A multilevel analysis,” has been cited 186 times, according to Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science.

And that appears to have been the last straw. As of last month, Dr. Stewart’s 16-year tenure at FSU seems to have come to an end. What are the odds that other papers he worked on have completely reliable data? I guess we’ll have to wait and see how many more get retracted. In any case, it’s remarkable that even with lots of evidence something was wrong, it took four years and six retracted papers to oust him.