About 'Many Co-Authors'

Who we are
This project was created by a team of 6 researchers who have co-authored with Francesca Gino: Max Bazerman, Julia Minson, Don Moore, Juliana Schroeder, Maurice Schweitzer, and Uri Simonsohn.

Why we created Many Co-Authors
In June 2023, after an 18-month investigation, Harvard University placed Prof. Francesca Gino on administrative leave and requested that four articles she co-authored be retracted based on concerns about data tampering.Gino has denied wrongdoing and has sued Harvard University. As a result of these events, there is now interest in the larger behavioral science community about the data used in other papers co-authored by Gino. In light of this interest,  as co-authors of Gino, we see it as our professional and moral obligation to provide information about the data provenance and data custody for those papers. The only information being provided by our platform is the provenance and availability of data as declared by each co-author. It is up to people tasked with making decisions about these papers: readers, editors, universities, co-authors, etc., to evaluate and interpret the information conveyed here as they see fit.

How the data were collected
We compiled a list of 138 published papers co-authored by Francesca Gino and emailed the pool of 143 co-authors. We invited them to participate in this project including a link to this platform, that took them to a page that displayed the list of articles they had co-authored, and the set of studies within those papers (e.g., "Study 1A", "Study 1B", etc). Co-authors then answered a multiple-choice question, for each study in each paper, asking whether Francesca Gino was involved in data collection (yes/no/don't know). For the subset of studies for which they indicated that she was involved, or that they did not know whether she was, they were also asked whether they ever had access to the raw data, and whether they currently have access to data needed to reproduce the results in the paper. Co-Authors were not asked about data for studies for which they indicated that Gino was not involved in data collection.  Lastly, each co-author had an open text form for each paper in which they can write anything they wish. The answers to the multiple choice questions are permanent, not editable, once this platform goes public, but these open text forms lead to 'living documents' that can be edited by each author at any time. The site makes all information that was collected public (previous versions of the living documents are deleted).