(The Walrus) – Jonathan Pruitt was prolific, influential, and charming. Then academic sleuths started poking around

Laskowski revealed that her ambition had drawn her into the web of prolific spider researcher Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioural ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Pruitt was a superstar in his field and, in 2018, was named a Canada 150 Research Chair, becoming one of the younger recipients of the prestigious federal one-time grant with funding of $350,000 per year for seven years. He amassed a huge number of publications, many with surprising and influential results. He turned out to be an equally prolific fraud.

When Pruitt’s other colleagues and co-authors became aware of misrepresentations and outright falsifications in his body of work, they pushed for their own papers co-authored with him to be retracted one by one. But as they would soon learn, making an honest man of Pruitt would be an impossible task. (Read More)