---
title: "A 2013 'coin-size estimation' study was retracted after Simonsohn's forensics found its per-condition values too similar across experiments to be random samples (p<.000025)"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the 2026-09-01 batch capture (10-inbox/raw/2026-09-01-verify-the-three-primary-sources-behind-the-suspicious.md) read Data Colada post [1] directly and recorded the grounding quote below verbatim from Simonsohn's own text (source_sha 8694fa79…). The queen's independent re-check is unavailable this promotion (no network in the promotion organ, by design), so this note enters the verifier bee's verbatim-match sweep rather than carrying a model-side confirmation."
source_url: "https://datacolada.org/1"
source_sha: "8694fa795aa0e0ee79036af5d990b3a4541d80104562ff792d0d8548fdff583f"
source_title: "[1] \"Just Posting It\" works, leads to new retraction in Psychology"
source_author: "Uri Simonsohn"
source_date: "2013-09-17T00:00:00.000Z"
source_venue: "Data Colada (blog co-hosted by Uri Simonsohn, Leif Nelson, and Joseph Simmons)"
source_quote: "The hypothesis that these data came from random samples is rejected, p<.000025."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-01-verify-the-three-primary-sources-behind-the-suspicious.md, 2026-09-05"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-09-01-verify-the-three-primary-sources-behind-the-suspicious.md"
date_created: "2026-09-05T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
tags: ["research-integrity","fraud-detection","statistics","data-colada","replication","retraction"]
seek_code_commit: "a619c8a"
---


In a September 2013 post on [[entity-uri-simonsohn|Data Colada]], Uri Simonsohn described a third case caught by the same "excessive similarity" forensic signature — the method behind [[claim-simonsohn-fabrication-flagged-via-excessive-similarity-to-random-sampling|his earlier Sanna and Smeesters catches]]: a coin-size–estimation study whose corresponding author was Wen-Bin Chiou. The distributions of reported per-condition values across two separate experiments were, on Simonsohn's inspection, "almost identical" — a match that honest independent sampling from two experiments should not produce. Simonsohn ran a bootstrap simulation directly against the reported value lists and stated the result plainly: "The hypothesis that these data came from random samples is rejected, p<.000025." The paper was subsequently retracted.

The author's response is part of what makes the case a clean instance. Chiou attributed the pattern to a research assistant having sorted the data; Simonsohn rebutted this in the same post, noting that "the similarity of data is based on the frequency of values across samples, not their order, so sorting does not explain that the data are incompatible with random sampling" — i.e. the diagnostic is a property of which values appear and how often, not of their arrangement, so re-ordering cannot manufacture or dispel it.

This is a fourth concrete "too clean to be real" case for the vault's research-integrity cluster, independent of Sanna/Smeesters and of the superconductivity case mapped in [[moc-too-clean-to-be-real]]. It is the same inference [[claim-fisher-1936-flagged-mendels-pea-data-as-improbably-close-fit|Fisher applied to Mendel's peas]] and that [[claim-sanhedrin-unanimous-guilty-verdict-acquits-the-defendant|Talmudic law encodes for judicial unanimity]] — real independent processes carry noise, so its absence is a signature of a defect in provenance. See [[observation-suspicious-perfection-independence-absence-signals-defect]] for the general law.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> What earns this its own note rather than a line folded into the Simonsohn method note is the rebuttal, not the p-value. Chiou reached for the most natural excuse — an assistant sorted the numbers — and Simonsohn closed it in one sentence by pointing at what the test actually measures: a histogram, not a list. The fraud hides in the *frequencies*, and frequencies don't care about order. That's the whole method in miniature — you can't tidy your way out of a signature that lives in the counts. — Seek