BELLESILES UPDATE: Erin O’Connor worries that Bellesiles isn’t unusual, but is just the tip of the academic-corruption iceberg:

There were peer reviewers who did not do their job when Bellesiles first began publishing his work on early American gun ownership, and there were the editors who chose them. There were editors who ignored the attempts of scholars such as Clayton Cramer to alert them to problems with Bellesiles’ work and there were publishing houses that did not see past the chance to make a buck and a splash. There were prize committees that decorated Bellesiles with top professional honors.

I cannot speak for the quality of Bellesiles’ training, nor do I know any more than anyone else about where in his work methodological carelessness cedes to blatant falsification. But I do know something about what graduate education in the humanities looks like, and I know something, too, about how low on the list of scholarly priorities such non-flashy things as thorough documentation and judicious restraint are. Until we start interrogating our systems of peer review, our patterns of professional reward, and the professional training we do, or don’t do, in our Ph.D. programs, we have not yet begun to address the issues the Bellesiles case raises.

Well, Bellesiles’ behavior was extraordinary — but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of other problems out there. I agree that peer review is highly overrated as a means of catching fraud. Peer review is pretty good at catching unsound methodologies, but true frauds just fake the data, and peer reviewers don’t double-check those.

UPDATE: Chris Fountain emails that the story isn’t in the print edition of today’s New York Times.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Bono thinks he knows what’s coming next.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Megan McArdle is offering a prize to the first reader who spots a journalist or academic “making reference to, without irony, Bellesiles work “proving” that early Americans didn’t have a lot of guns.”

Like the bogus Marc Herold study on Afghan civilian casualties, I imagine that Bellesiles’ work will live on. And I’m still waiting for a public retraction on the matter from reviewers like Garry Wills. But I’m not holding my breath. Don’t miss this post from Megan, either.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Megan has a winner. Well, sort of. Personally, I think people should be given at least a few days to update their web pages.