But I guess that charisma counts for more in todays world, at least until even the monkeys in your lab begin to lodge complaints!

Regarding the question of whether the retracted paper was influential, I assume that you refer to google citation counts, not to actual impact factors. While 85 google citations aren’t bad, it’s not unusual for Cognition either, and it’s dwarfed by more than 1600 google citations of Hauser’s paper with Fitch and Chomsky in Science. People clearly read it, but it wasn’t precisely the discovery of DNA.

Regarding the pattern you seem to see, it seems to be based more on the general tone of the boston.com piece than on fact. I’m not really an avid reader of retractions, but it seems to me that most are rather tightlipped, including those that appear in Cognition. Sure, one would like to know more, but that’s not what usually happens. Last year, there was another retraction, check it out how informative it is. The “public accusation” you refer to is a single quote provided by this globe.com writer that might or might not accurately reflect what the researcher in question actually said, the claim that “colleagues were aware…” is not backed up by any sources at all except for the quote attributed to that single researcher. Finally, Hauser did report the failure to replicate for this other paper. Regarding the other papers under investigation, you might want to look there:

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/07/22/rspb.2010.1441.short

This sounds a lot more like a problem with bookkeeping than with dishonesty, and in this case, they appear to have replicated their results. Nobody here knows what the problem really was, but I personally don’t like to judge people before knowing the facts, based on a newspaper article that relies more on an accusatory tone than on actual evidence.

Incorrect. 87 citations over 8 years for a paper in a lesser journal in a field that is not, say, cancer-related is pretty damn good. Anything with IF around 10 is influential. Same way as PNAS (IF~10) is an influential journal.

The pattern I referred to is this:
- The retraction is BS. The way it is written it is not an honest retraction.
- Public accusations like “there was not a thread of compelling evidence — scientific or otherwise” are not exactly run of the mill.
- Previous paper not retracted even though its findings were not replicated by soem of its authors.
- Statement “colleagues … have been aware for some time that questions had been raised about some of his research” reads to me as implying more than one paper. Nature News says two more papers are “flagged for investigation”.

All I know at this point is that the pattern seems very familiar to known instances of fraud and that more information is absolutely required to be sure one way or another. That Prof. Hauser is not the one supplying such information does not inspire confidence in his honesty. That, too.

Similar abilities have been found in other animals, here are just two examples from Nature and Science with rats and bees, but there are other examples.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/319/5871/1849
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6831/full/410930a0.html

The big thing about this specific Hauser paper was that it used methods that are very similar to those used with human infants (rather than conditioning methods), and that it used human speech with monkeys.

Nothing against Cognition, which is excellent. My point is that I find it very hard to believe that somebody like Hauser with all his Nature/Science publications would take such risks to get a paper into Cognition.

Just sayin’

Also, the pattern in that boston.com piece does not show any past fraud at all – apparently, there was a single result over a period of 30 years that couldn’t be replicated, which is rather impressive with messy behavioral data. Apparently, it was Hauser himself who published the failure to replicate. So much for a pattern of past fraud.

Something is fishy in that story. Perhaps someone disliked Hauser?

I have to agree that this entire story is smelly. I had a look at what the retracted article actually says [http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/%7Emnkylab/publications/languagespeech/rulelearn.pdf].

It’s utter bullshit that this was a highly influential paper. It shows that monkeys can tell apart the pattern in syllable sequences like we-we-li (first two syllables repeated) from the pattern in syllable sequences like we-li-li (last two syllables repeated). Similar abilities have been observed in all kinds of animals, so it’s not really as earth-shattering as that boston.com writer claims. And given the quantity of Hauser’s high-level publications in Science, Nature and the like, I doubt it that somebody like him would risk his career for an arcane paper in a journal like Cognition.