Nfter Colette Nesemann wrote her first scientific publication, something happened that she had previously thought unimaginable. It happened when the PhD student in psychology was talking to her supervisor about the work. “And she said: You can’t publish it like that,” Nesemann recalls. The reason: The result of the investigation on which the “paper” was based was not exactly surprising. And now? “The doctoral supervisor suggested that I simply leave out a group of people I was examining so that the results would be more interesting.” Nesemann refused. But then, she says, her doctoral supervisor said that if she wanted to continue working at the chair, she would advise her “to do it as she had suggested – i.e. scientifically unclean”. But Nesemann was not ready for that, and her position in the department deteriorated after that: “I was no longer allowed to travel to conferences, received no more research funds and had to do what nobody else wanted to do.”
Scientific misconduct and abuse of power by professors is alarmingly common. This was also recently revealed by a survey by the ombudsman committee of the German Society for Psychology, in which more than 1,300 scientific employees in the Department of Psychology took part. “I knew it was a problem, but I never thought it would happen so often,” says Jutta Stahl, a professor of psychology at the University of Cologne, who is a member of the ombudsman’s committee. According to the study, almost half of those surveyed have experienced something like this themselves.