Fresh concerns raised over academic conduct of major US nutrition and behaviour lab

With eleven publications already under scrutiny, new evidence emerges of duplicate publication and data irregularities in the work of Professor Brian Wansink

The head of Cornell University's Food and Brand lab is facing renewed allegations of academic misconduct, including self-plagiarism and potential data misrepresentation. Professor Brian Wansink, who has authored hundreds of scientific papers and is a former agency director in the US Department of Agriculture, is famous for promoting the concepts of "mindless eating" and the idea that people find it easier to control their food intake when eating from smaller plates. However, an investigation by University of Groningen PhD student Nick Brown has apparently revealed repeated cases of duplicate publication in Wansink's research, as well as unusual data irregularities across two studies.

Wansink's research first fell under scrutiny in late 2016 when, in a blog post called "The Grad Student Who Never Said No", he appeared to champion the use of grey research practices as career tools for young scientists - practices such as selectively reporting positive results from a dataset of primarily null outcomes, and presenting data fishing as hypothesis testing. Analyses of the published results by Tim van der Zee, Jordan Anaya and Nick Brown later identified what appear to be hundreds of statistical inconsistencies in four of the articles where Wansink admitted deploying such practices, and Anaya later raised concerns about the accuracy of seven additional publications. After refusing to share the raw data, Wansink promised to conduct an internal investigation of four of the eleven publications.