"We've investigated ourselves and found that we have done nothing wrong."

The irony of it being criminology.

Student: **accidentally plagiarize** life gets ruined Professor: **commits fraud** this is ok

As a grad student, this story rings too true. This happens way too often because of the pressure of publishing relevant matter. Sad.

Can't imagine the time it took to put this video together. Really interesting and entertaining, well done man!

I studied Neuropsych under an amazing professor who forever changed the way I view the world. She would bring in a series of published studies and tasked us with finding inconsistencies and whether the conclusions drawn were actually proven by the data. I was amazed at how many published studies we found to be flawed. She also highlighted for us the replication crisis. I am reminded of her teachings whenever I hear a student of soft science declare with absolute certainty that some study proves X. The scariest part to me is that you have sociology majors attempting to mold society based on completely biased nonsense. I consider the corruption of science to be the most detrimental to human progress.

UPDATE: As of 2023, Stewart was fired. The investigation was restarted in 2020 according to the Daily Mail, perhaps even because of this video..?

I investigated myself and after very careful deliberation I found myself to be innocent.

This stuff happens everyday everywhere. I've witnessed it first hand twice. The world is corrupt unfortunately.

Last time I was this early, telephone poll response rates were 21%

Oh wow. I was not expecting a baby-faced Coffeezilla. Nice to see he's been doing good work since the beginning.

We really need new videos like this one, especially in the light of the Stanford and Harvard scandals

As a post-graduate research student, stuff like this makes my blood boil

"Research fraud is rare" Yeah I'd like to think that too, but there's no good way to be sure about that.

For those who would like an update on this, Eric Stewart was fired from Florida University as of July 2023 due to “extreme negligence and incompetence.". Retraction watch has an article on it, in case you want to dig a bit deeper

"wow this coffee break channel seems interest- WAIT IS THAT COFFEE ZILLA???"

The Perfect Crime = Thief is given Gold from the bank because the bank didn't want anyone to know it was getting robbed. _Outside organizations also say it's legal to do so._

I think just like auditors in commerce, there should be authorities totally separated from these colleges and institution to check on the cases of frauds like these.

My dumbass put this on for background noise and kept thinking 'he sounds like coffeezilla' then I looked and was shocked 😭

And to think I got into trouble for "plagiarising" my own lab report because I had copy pasted descriptive statements like " the above table describes blah blah..." from my previous lab report because both experiments were pretty similar!!

Source(s): Dude, trust me.

I'm really happy you've taken an interest in investigating scientific fraud. You hit the inherent conflict of interest of universities investigating their own faculty, who both bring in grant money and rep their brand, right on the head. It's a biiig problem in many fields.

I ran into this problem in the academic community back in 1968 . It has been going on for a long time and continues . Don't make waves . It's their way or the highway .

Damn. Stumbling upon a dead Coffeezilla channel in 2023

"No evidence of wrong doing" can coexist with "no evidence of doing it right."

You’d think a doctor would be smarter with his fraud.

The amount of work this must have taken is insane. You don't really see this kinda thing on youtube. Keep up the amazing work!

Very nicely done... It's pain enough to do real scientific research … without the insane distortions by fraudsters and scammers (who often burn resources that could have been used by those doing meaningful honest work).

for those who think Coffee Break should upload more *_remember he has other channels he uploads to_* Edit: check it out

So happy someone covers the replication crisis happening is the scientific feild so well for the layman.

This is one of the reasons I left Academia post graduate. That and my academic mentor of 5 years straight up told me “we’re not in the business of curing anything but of symptom management because if we did the former we would be out of business”.

Thank you. Keep calling them out. This is the tip of the iceberg. There is boatloads of this kind of behavior going on.

As a criminology major about to graduate with a degree in the field, I appreciate this video to remind me I have an actual job to do in the future, and it’s to fight inaccuracies within my field. Things like this effect the lives of minorities and people of specific situations across the world, not just in the United States. Thank you CB

Accusation of scientific fraud from credible sources should be investigated by independent investigators. Science has another way to deal with results of fraud, replication. If the study hasn't been replicated then it shouldn't be given too much credit. But if the results are sensational then the media will report them no matter how small the sample size or how noisy the data. Very few reporters of science and technology understand what they are reporting on. They understand what makes a good story, creating a good story is their job, accuracy takes second seat to that.

I feel bad for picket. Finding out that your mentor was a (potential) fraudster must be hard. I hope he finds better people to work with.

Nearing sixty years of age and having a good memory with good observational skills I have arrived at the same conclusion countless times, you can not have a sane or functional society in the absence of ethics and accountability. This literally applies to all aspects of human life, if those critical traits/requirements are absent, you will have a failing and diseased society.

2 Washington Post headlines from 2014 and 2015 noted peer review scandals that made major publishes retract multiple articles; It's not surprising due to the way this research is funded and the fact that researchers rely so heavily on funding in order to have work/jobs - The whole system is flawed

I thought it was coffeezilla with another stefan james video at first! Great video as always!

As far as semantics, I spent a large majority of my career, I'm 45, in marketing and merchandising. I was the middle man between vendors and a global retailer. I found that in the industry, there is a specific legal language. This language is designed to be technically true but deliberately misleading. In the business, you learn to become fluent in this language if you want to be successful. Once you become fluent, you see it everywhere anyone is trying to sell you anything. You don't need an advanced medical degree to recognize the language. You don't need an economics degree..... etc. There are people who are good at it, and then there are politicians who are bad. When it's bad, it's obvious. Secondly, research needs to be funded. Oftentimes, it's funded by a source that wants a specific conclusion. If you find otherwise, you lose funding. When you lose funding, you don't get a paycheck. There is Science and then there is $cience.

$228 for a records request? They paid somebody to look for it for 20 hours? Did the person have to Fly to Alaska to access paper docs or something?

The source of this problem is clear. Research is no longer a primary concern. They need to look like they're doing real work but they're mainly about enrolment figures. It's a simple formula: second rate education + worthless degree = $.

5:56 -- The papers were retracted, but there was no investigation of any possible fraud -- despite the suspect's contradictory stories about the origin of the data that were the basis of those papers.

I just learned that this guy finally got busted and his papers retracted. You were ahead of the curve Coffee.

Outstanding video Stephen. The amount of work you put into this production was well worth it, because your final product is stellar: interesting, informative, and superbly well narrated. The findings, of course, are irritating to say the least, but well done Stephen.

You can't serve two masters, money is the problem here.

Thank you for making this video and digging into the corruption at universities. Please continue doing so. There's a lot left to uncover, especially in relation to politics. Sadly, those discussions are dangerous these days.

If something so simple can exhaust so much effort in its cover up, how much does this happen without ever being found out? That’s the larger implication here.

This sounds like when I wrote an analysis Irish fiction in high school and invented a book to include. Whenever I needed to back up a point I had made, I simply referred to something from that book 😀. Thank goodness the internet did not exist then, and I lived in Bolivia. I got an A!

"Who shall guard the guards?"

Great video! This is so common in the entire research community in many industries

This is such impressive investigative journalism. Keeps it up! This is the important stuff!

“FSU Criminology Professor Abruptly Leaves After Accusations of Cooking *Race Data* ” “Professor Eric Stewart, accused of *faking data that makes racism against black and hispanic Americans seem more common than it is* , suddenly exits FSU ” - The Florida Standard, Livia Caputo, April 7, 2023

This reminds me very much of a study on the brony fandom by a Dr. Patrick Edwards, circa 2012. The backstory, as I recall, is that Edwards discovered his son enjoying My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and decided to investigate further with a series of surveys. The first two surveys’ results painted an overwhelmingly positive image. A third survey was posted, regarding the dark side of the fandom, with specific questions about trolls and so-called “cloppers”. Those results never materialized, and when a fourth survey was announced to characterize the types of bronies, I emailed the study. To my chagrin, they feigned ignorance and pointed me to the fourth survey. I strongly suspect, but cannot prove, that there is a very large element of the brony fandom, possibly even a hidden majority, that can be described as sexually deviant. Rather than risk his son’s reputation, Edwards swept that survey under a rug and pretended it never existed. I don’t believe anyone probed further. Bronies were eager for positive propaganda, and certainly no journalist cared enough.

"Research fraud is rare"... "Where is your research showing otherwise?"

Nice Work Coffee , Gold Star for you .

It begins with a commercial for Neil Degrasse Tyson. Priceless.

No. It does actually not contradict the sentence "we found no evidence that the data used by Dr. Steward in the five papers at issue were fabricated" They only say they found no evidence. The easiest way for them to say that is if they never were looking for evidence of that in the first place (or if they were, if they just weren't looking that deeply)

Confirmation Bias plagues academia, IMO. I realized that by my sophomore year of my Political Science degree. Scientific discovery is a free-for-all, and there are some bad apples who slip through the cracks and maintain authority as references in subsequent research. One malicious Descriptive Statistic could cause a rot that propagates throughout research topics throughout decades if germane, contemporary literature isn't available to researchers. And if no one else is reproducing the forged data, especially to debunk it, then it will remain. Thanks for your investigation, OP. I'm glad someone is shedding light onto this issue. Maybe I'll have to peruse some journals and try to reproduce your findings by finding another case study somewhere. ;)

Fabulous essay. Well constructed, forgiving in parts, spot-on the moral and intellectual failures. Thanks for a great job. Should be a 'standard' for even 'regular' reporting (rarely seen, these days). Hope this video is used extensively in journalism classes around the world.

Francesca Gino, a prominent professor at Harvard Business School known for researching dishonesty and unethical behavior, has been accused of submitting work that contained falsified results.

The problem is not science itself, it is the Politics of Science.

i keep checking my emails cos of the sound effects

This type of format and author is the future of journalism. Well done.

I just found this channel...I had no idea it was coffeezilla. It bums me out that this isn't more popular, as it seems so much of a societal service than the stuff he's doing now...not that I don't appreciate the things he's doing now, but this seems to cover so much more ground.

If 90% never get caught, just imagine the huge amounts of treatments and medicines that are pure magical elixirs and nothing more...

holy crap. who is this guy ! he looks 24 and does such indepth and well researched investigations in such niche and high profile cases. im blown away by such a thorough work and probably done solo too. kudos !

damn youtube algorithm got me feeling like an archeologist so this is where coffeezilla came from

This is so valuable. I say we petition to bring back coffebreak

U should upload more. Your videos are extremely intriguing

This is a really serious problem, and this is a great video explaining it. It sucks that professors’ incentives hinge on getting paid & research funding. Hopefully we can find a solution soon, we need it.

Please if possible, do a follow-up video in the future if there is any new updates or information regarding this potential fraud case. I hope that justice will be served.

ACCOUNTABILITY. America desperately needs this.

The first problem here is that you've expected a "for-profit" entity -- the *university* -- to conduct an 'inquiry' into an 'investigation' that could harm its future stream-of-profits. That's not how 'for-profits' work. They also didn't find that "all-the-rules-were-followed"... they found "there's-nothing-to-see-here". Those are two distinctly different outcomes. Those are not synonyms. When you have a set of rules, you must *_also_* have a set of PRIORITIES. For example, if you decide that you're going to be a 'for-profit' institution as-well-as a *credible university* ... then how do you proceed if following one of the rules then conflicts with another rule? IE, being honest here would cost them money.... making money requires this to be retroactively-dishonest. You can't have both. You -- and the originating investigative statistician -- have blatantly, optimistically, and foolishly misinterpreted the *priorities* of this university. It's for this same reason that so many young, dumb kids go and get degrees that are worth essentially nothing; _the false idealism that the university prioritizes academia and integrity over money_ Or to put it another way, "This degree must be valuable... they wouldn't offer it if it were not." *FALSE.* They offer it be cause you demand it.... you wave someone else's money in their face, so they tell you what you want to hear, charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then give you a receipt on faux parchment instead of the standard 'ribbon paper' you see at a supermarket. It's still dog-shit. "You're a victim... it's not your fault.... blame white / male / heterosexual / Western / Colonial ... your feelings matter" (Please pay the registrar) As if you needed proof of this: average salary for a Harvard Professor, Yale Professor, or Stanford Professor: (top five Ivie's) $200,000k ..... that's what they are paid to tell you that communism and socialism are superior. Fucking. Joke.

I come from the future to inform you, you aint seen nothing yet…

good timing given the 2018 chemistry nobel laureate francis arnold just retracted her research paper.

First time I've watched one of your videos that isnt on the Coffeezilla channel. Gotta say Stephen, I fucking love you. You do such a great job with every video you do.

Thank you for exposing this fraud

He’s back

I think this guy just got fired

Loved the video! I'm brand new to your channel (after just discovering Nerd City, who referenced you) and I have to say, thanks for the time, work, editing, and research you put in to this content! You know what you're doing and you're confident in it! Glad you're out here making videos about the kinds of things no one else is talking about! This concept of research fraud was entirely new to me and helps provide some good perspective about the academic and scientific community.

What's important tho is getting the fraud fired immediately, because he took the job from a competent person who deserve that job.

"I am not saying that he definitely commited fraud" Video title: The perfect crime - Scientific fraud in America Well yeah technically you weren't saying exactly that...

Damn, was not expecting to find a coffeezilla channel in the rough

It's 2023 and these revelations seem innocent and quaint. I'm nostalgic for such small-time corruption and fraud!

What did his "research" show? What was the survey conclusions? !?!??????

Great video. It's a shame the following week CoffeeBreak accidentally fell down from a 2 meter high wall and died at his France villa.

I love how this channel is the more professional, formal version of coffezilla

Oh whaaat its coffeezilla lmao this channel popped up on my feed and watched 2 videos already and I just noticed it now

two types of scientists, ones that want to find answers and people who think "This job pays money"

I’ve been repeatedly told in alarmist terms that my eye pressure is alarmingly high and my blood pressure is off the charts. I did a private practice pre-op to avoid the alarmist diagnosis. Was I ever surprised to learn if I paid $100 out of pocket that I had perfect readings! I triple checked with this private pay Internist and there was absolutely nothing wrong. Back to the managed care, and bingo off the charts, why aren’t you taking a med for this, oh my god... and I mentioned what I found. She said it does not show up on my chart. I said it was not in their database. Then I calmly stated what I say here and asked her why is it that when I paid out of pocket my blood pressure and everything else showed up as perfect? She didn’t answer... Yeah...

Thank you for your video! Fraud is an increasing problem in most societies.

The media circa 2020-2023: "Trust the experts" The experts: "I'm just making this shit up to push an agenda" The people who hire them: "If we admit they're frauds, nobody will trust us" Me: *Earned, and well deserved.*

Since the purpose of the study, and the nature of the questionable [everything about it] all have politically-related outcomes, FSU's list of top donors makes for an interesting read in that light.

I love the CoffeeBreak mug!

I love how referencing a criminology scandal the commentator goes to a "magic grits"-esque line of inquiry, suspending the laws of physics. My Cousin Vinny has one of the best courtroom cross examination scenes in all of movie/television history, and suspending the law of physics whether its cooking grits or a business generating work product years after the last employees did any work is always persuasive and highly entertaining. Kudos, Coffee Break!

The profit motive ruins everything.

@coffeebreak What was the study even about? Just curious what false information was spread

Ladies and Gentleman, the one and only Coffeezilla.

Things went full meta when he mentioned the book _"Fraud and misconduct in research"_ 😵

It’s inconvenient this adds fuel to the fire for people who don’t trust science in this country. But thank you for having an honest conversation about it. This is why we can’t put profit into science! If you go in with the wrong hypothesis and don’t get the data you expect your career could be over. Like you said, science isn’t flawed, people abusing it to cover their asses is. And if there wasn’t a whole lot of money on the line that professor wouldn’t have felt the need to botch data. The University wouldn’t have had to feel embarrassed because disproving a hypothesis is just as valuable as proving a hypothesis. It wouldn’t have to be embarrassing because it would be a good thing they caught a rare anomaly, a rare professor who changes data sets. But you go all the way to the root and at every level of perversion of data when a study is botched this way, it comes down to power (in the form of money and credibility). If universities suddenly started strictly investigating these claims quickly a lot more of these cases would be found. And those schools would be punished for it with a loss of profits they need to run.