Some further observations concerning Sir Cyril Burt
Brian E. Butler, Jennifer Petrulis · British Journal of Psychology · 1999
Sir Cyril Burt was posthumously accused of fraud when it was noted that his 1966 paper on separated twins contained the same correlation values as his 1955 paper on twins, even though the sample sizes differed. We have found a new version of his 1955 paper which was reprinted in a book of readings but was ‘abridged and revised’ by Burt. The changes that Burt made in the reprinted paper make it difficult to determine when the extra twin data was collected and show that Burt was willing to misrepresent his own work. It would appear that Burt recycled old text to produce a new paper using a ‘cut and paste’ technique. The alleged fraud probably occurred when Burt extended these methods from text to data.