27 - Clawing Back a Promising Paper

Summary

TMA: Over twenty years ago, when Regina was my graduate student in psychology at Brandeis University and Heather was my lab manager, Regina and I collaborated on a creativity experiment. Regina had taken the lead on the project and was first author on the paper, which we had submitted to a journal. We were delighted when the editor wrote back after skimming the paper, saying that he found it very interesting and was sending it out for review immediately. We crossed our fingers and hoped for the best as we plunged back into our other in-progress research. This was Regina’s second submission to a scholarly journal, and we were both hopeful that it would help build her curriculum vitae in the years before her job market entry. Regina excitedly shared the results at our weekly brown bag series, where Heather expressed an interest in the paper.

HC: After reading Regina and Teresa’s paper, I suspected that the central analysis that they used, a True Score ANCOVA, could be useful for a study I had conducted, and so I asked Regina to show me how to do it. She agreed, and we sat down at a lab computer to look together at the syntax file for the analysis. During Regina’s explanation, I spotted misplaced parentheses in the coding of the covariate. After she acknowledged the mistake, I said that I realized this could affect the paper she had under review. I felt very badly about it because I knew that Regina had invested a great deal of time in the study, and I also knew that rerunning the analysis might change the results. We talked about what to do. I did not want to pressure Regina into rechecking the analysis, but I think we both knew that this was what should happen.